#181 Do you know how much you are spending in subscriptions?!

I recently decided to try to take a look at all of my various online subscriptions to see what I have and how much it is. I include below a spreadsheet grid that shows what I found out. I was taken aback to say the least. I really did not expect to have an annual bill that high.

Another thing that I found, and I wonder if this is a business opportunity, is that it is really not easy to track down your subscriptions. At least not for me. I went through emails, I went through apps, I went through both major app stores, Google Play and the Apple store. And sometimes I had to e-mail them to find out how I could cancel it. The subscriptions are insidious. They creep up on you. I had no idea that I had subscribed to this many services. Individually, they seem trivial. But they definitely add up.

An added note is that so many of them market it as a MONTHLY cost which is pretty small by itself. The numbers shown in my spreadsheet I annualized to get a better picture.

So, the purpose of this blog article is to posit that it wouldn't hurt anybody to take a look at what you're subscribed to and why. I was able to fairly rapidly identify at least $1100 worth of subscriptions that I did not need, that were duplicated, or that I didn't use. And another thing about these subscriptions, which I'm sure all you intelligent readers know, is most of them are set up for auto-renew. And in the rush of daily life, we don't even notice when they send a notice saying it's about to renew or we say ‘Oh yes I'll deal with that later’. Yes. I’ve failed on that. ☹

As an example, I subscribed to Spotify. Now Spotify is a very nice service, but I get Amazon Music free with my prime subscription, so what on earth led me to get Spotify? I have no idea. I'm sure it was probably at the spur of the moment, I was looking for some piece of music and maybe I couldn't find it on Amazon Prime so I thought -- I'll try Spotify, but I don't think it's worth $120 a year for a duplicate music subscription service when I do not listen to music that much these days.

As another example, not quite so clear cut, I am subscribed to 4 different cloud storage services. OneDrive, Drop Box, Google Drive, and Sync. Sync is my primary and it replaced Acronis as my primary method of backing up my files. OneDrive is actually included in my Office 365 subscription so that is a no-brainer to keep, and I’m wavering about Drop Box and Google Drive. The only reason I want to keep at least one of these two, is because they are ubiquitous and it is easy to send people files that way. Just saying though — it is worth examining this stuff.

So … thought I’d put that out there. Incidentally, I’m reasonably sure this list isn’t complete. I keep running across services or apps that I didn’t find on the first sweep. 😊

 A la Monty Python – And now for something completely different 😊 – I found this sign in one of my favorite restaurants in the bathroom. It is fairly common in Argentina to see signs in the bathrooms that if one needs a condom, to ask at the cash register for them. I imagine this is a public initiative to reduce STDs and unwanted pregnancies. However, the wording on this sign was cute. It says, “If your story is going to continue at the house, you can request condoms at the cash register” 😊