Imagine your wallet is on a diet, and your monthly subscriptions are the junk food. We sign up for a free trial here, a must-have service there, and before we know it, our bank account is hemorrhaging money faster than a leaky faucet. It’s time to use the wand that will transform your financial landscape and put you back in control.
The Subscription Count Challenge
Let’s start with a fun game. Try to count how many subscriptions you have. Not just streaming services—everything you pay for on a regular basis. We’re willing to bet you might miss one or two on the first try. The sheer number of different directions our money goes means it’s easy to forget you signed up for a free trial until months after it’s started billing you, for example.
The Subscription Sleuths
Enter the subscription sleuths. These are apps that help you identify the recurring payments leaving your bank account, so you can make sure you actually want to keep subscribing to all of them. They can help you renegotiate better deals on your smartphone contract, set up savings accounts for you, manage a more effective way of paying off debt, reduce the amount you need to pay on a parking ticket, and lots more—usually with minimal effort from you.
The Trust Trade-off
However, there’s a catch. These apps, by their very nature, need access to your financial records. By connecting them to your banking accounts you are trusting them to treat your data securely and respectfully. While we have no reason to suspect any of these apps are untrustworthy, you should definitely read through their privacy policies too.
DoNotPay
One such app is DoNotPay, which markets itself as ‘the world’s first robot lawyer’. It’s ready and willing to help you contest parking tickets, cut through government bureaucracy, cancel digital subscriptions you’ve forgotten about, take on issues with customer service reps, and plenty more besides.
RocketMoney
Another app, RocketMoney, is a comprehensive money-tracking (and money-saving) service that looks at several different aspects of your finances, including the amount of money you’re spending on digital subscriptions every month—which is very possibly adding up to more than you think.
Trim
Trim is another app that lives up to its name: It “trims” down your regular expenditures by identifying areas where you’re spending unnecessarily or spending more than you need to—from car insurance that’s too high to regular outgoing subscriptions that you might have forgotten about (which it can cancel on your behalf).
Clarity Money
Clarity Money is a comprehensive financial tracking app that adds a dash of artificial intelligence to spot areas in your life where you could be saving money: that could be by investing in a high yield savings account, for example, or canceling recurring payments for services you don’t use.
Bobby
Bobby is a more straightforward way of keeping tabs on the subscriptions and outgoing expenditures that you have—it doesn’t offer all of the extra money management features of the apps we’ve already talked about, and it asks you to do more of the work manually.
TrackMySubs
TrackMySubs gives you an overview of your outgoings and lets you organize your expenditure into categories too—entertainment, insurance, utilities, or whatever. It’s easy to see what’s going out and when, and if you want to you can have the app email you alerts whenever a payment is about to go out, which is handy.
The Art of Subscription Management
So, there you have it. The secret to managing your monthly subscriptions is not a magic wand, but a combination of awareness, decision-making, and the right tools. And remember, every dollar saved on unnecessary subscriptions is a dollar that can be invested in your future. So go forth, trim those subscriptions, and let your wallet breathe a sigh of relief. And remember, the only subscription you should never cancel is the one to laughter!
