There are lots of challenges to actually canceling subscriptions, but not knowing that you're being charged for something every month? Seems absent-minded to me.
"But, if it's that bad, they shouldn't even be signing up for this stuff!", I hear some of you saying. You look for an escape wherever you can. Some little thing that will pull you, even for a moment, out of the monotony of the daily grind. Don't blame these people.
You can easily say the same thing about someone who does work a high-tech job. You make so much money you stop looking at your bank accounts. There are so many new grads or even late 20s professionals who barely manage their finances beyond 1-2 months. I would argue middle-class folks manage the idea of a "6 month emergency fund" a lot better than those in high-tech who make 200k+ a year and just don't think about money anymore.
I think the right reasons are:
- folks don't know how to do this (literally what does it means to review your statements and check your accounts + what to look for)
- folks do not understand how manageable it can be once you spend the initial activation energy
- last and maybe most controversial, folks don't have the ability to make it a habit (which then causes every few months for it to become a big hurdle).
No you F-ing can't, and if you even remotely think that, you have never experienced poverty. Life's a lot different when your bills are $X this month and working 60 hours only makes you $X-$1000. "Change your expenses" Oh yeah? Am I supposed to WILL cheaper apartments into existence? Am I supposed to magically reduce the cost of my groceries? Am I supposed to pray away the late fee on my cell phone plan because I literally had $10 in my bank account and couldn't pay it?
It is expensive to be poor, intentionally so. It is a huge source of profit for numerous companies to make poor people pay more for the same service and access.
I'm sick and tired of privileged jerks saying "Just be better with your money" as if you can magically stretch your $15 and hour job to cover $1500 a month in rent, or that you should have no problem scheduling things when you can't even know your work schedule the week before.
What part of "personal responsibility" changes that your rent goes up %5 every single damn year, and your pay check does not?
I grew up in poverty. I only escaped it through sheer luck that I am above average intelligence and my hyperfixation was computers and computing history and programming, and despite a literal full ride scholarship to a second rate state college, I still couldn't afford it without my jackass Rich Uncle, who is exactly the type to complain about "personal responsibility", writing a $10K check. Now I pay $20k or more in taxes every year, for the rest of my life, which clearly offsets the 16 years times $10k a year "tuition" it costs to put someone through public school.
But notably, that doesn't undo the actual, physiological changes in my brain that come from growing up in poverty. These changes cause you to make less rational and less value-positive decisions. But no, definitely my fault that my brain broke when my mom spent most nights screaming and crying and trying to not starve to death.
Meanwhile she has literally won awards in the state for being one of the best teachers. For 30 years. She still cries about the suffering we experienced. But no, better that poor people get screwed over if they don't make perfect decisions, that they are empirically wired to not be able to do as easily as someone who grew up in a not financially stressed household.
Those whom have reached financial escape velocity, or never had to reach it because of good fortune, often are biased towards believing that their current lifestyle is entirely the result of their own decisions and didn't involve luck.
People should act with personal responsibility, but all the personal responsibility in the world won't make a winner in a losing situation. Anyone can do what Warren Buffet does, but Buffet doesn't risk starvation or having his children live on the street when things don't work out.
Is it a human right to live in a $1500/mo apartment? Is it a human right to live within a short commute of your workplace? Is it a human right to have your salary increase commensurate with inflation or your increase in costs when you're doing the same job from 5 years ago?
When someone says "be better with your money" they're not telling you that your $15/hr job should cover your $1500/mo rent, they're telling you that you shouldn't be living in a $1500/mo apartment on $15/hr. I'm willing to bet a lot of them have no idea just how little $15/hr is, though.
This is directly saying that janitors, coffee pourers, cashiers, etc shouldn't be able to live where they work. This is explicitly saying that people who can't get a valuable job should be expected to commute farther, longer, less reliably, etc than anyone else.
Why? Does SV not buy coffee? Does NYC not need to be cleaned? These jobs need to be done, and it isn't the janitor's fault nobody built a damn apartment complex in the city to house them.
Developer now (a career mistake honestly), but back then I would've never had any subscriptions. Can't imagine being back in those shoes and having the TIME to fully utilize Netflix, Spotify etc.
My advice is if you're in that position, work more. Study more or work more. Trying to avoid it with some escape like watching Netflix is not productive and only makes things worse.
When I was in college, I kept a strict schedule. Classes from 9AM-1PM, work from 2PM-7PM, 7PM-12:30AM I was in the library studying until it closed. My grades suffered but there wasn't any time for TV. I simply cannot imagine getting ahead NOT doing this, and sitting on Spotify or Netflix instead. Almost scary, guaranteed way to remain a dud. But I'm sure it's common. Given life is harder now than it was 50 years ago, I'm sure the lack of effort + lazy ways is why everyone thinks times are so tough. If times are tough, we need to become tough.
For me, that life was satisfying. I needed no "escape", as I liked and struggle to remain productive today and feel more than ever the need for an escape. I often tell people my hobby is "survival". Fixing my truck, reviewing/fine tuning my finances, working on my house, strategizing for life. The issue isn't not enough time watching Youtube. It's that I'm not productive enough.
Doubly true for the "downtrodden" poor. It's just that most of them are not the forgotten men, the abandoned hardy stock from the upper midwest that know what it takes to get ahead. They've been groomed to complain and sulk instead. It's a lot easier. When I meet these people I ask them, "have you done your best for the Lord?". They have everything they need, breath in their lungs. All I ever needed. It's disrespectful to Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ to not do our best in life. Once I see these people exhaust all possible options to improve their condition, then I'll give them a handout and sympathy. Till then, no Netflix, more work. Or suffer, whatever is preferred.
We missed the period of time where you could "work your way through college" and have it paid off by the time you graduated, but we were able to graduate with reasonable levels of debt. I think I had $20k in debt when I graduated in 2008. My first apartment was a $450/mo room in someone's house then a $500/mo studio.
It's not possible to graduate college today only $20k in debt and they're going to make $10k/yr more than I did but have to pay for a $1800/mo studio (the median rent in the same town I got that $500/mo studio in 15 years ago). So it's great that you were disciplined but that's not the only thing that matters and each year things are a little worse for those just starting out.
The only thing you can control is yourself. There's really nothing anyone can do about conditions. I do believe that no one and nothing has more control over your life, than yourself.
I really do wish banks or visa/mastercard would offer virtual card functionality. It really would empower users to have more control over their money and improve security and privacy.
But my settings are changed out from under me constantly. So I wouldn't trust being reliant upon them. Which in that case I'd rather have no signal, as this gets categorized differently in my brain where I think we are naturally inclined to believe any signal is stronger than it actually is. So it's harder to lull myself into a false sense of security and the friction is sometimes purposefully self inflicted. I can totally understand how the same explanation and justification can be used in the opposite direction though, to I guess this is a personal thing.
I do still believe that there should be a __legal__ requirement that users must verify and approve any price change to a reoccurring fixed rate subscription. I'm open to not being aware of nuance that needs to be considered or how it can/will be trivially abused, but I have a hard time seeing how this would not be simple basic consumer protection. I do not think it is in the public interest for companies to be able to employ strategies which are intentionally designed to trick the public and/or customers. While I appreciate you laying our your strategy (I just don't think it'll work for me but I'm sure it'll be beneficial to others) I want to make sure that we also do not codify coping mechanisms as solutions to problematic behaviors.
A CLI to parse all the emails and roll them up into a nice summary would be a neat little project as well!
Indeed, I wouldn't want that but glad it's an option.
There's no need to review transactions the moment they happen to catch any fraud. It is fine to wait for the statement and review it once a month. You're still not liable, so there's no rush to do it immediately.
> I really do wish banks or visa/mastercard would offer virtual card functionality.
Some do, although for some reason it has never worked for me (but also have not tried debugging the process too much).
The searchable database of charge history would be nice though. My card number has changed a few times due to data breaches at places I’ve used the card and I don’t think my credit card company’s search is smart enough to follow branches.
Having it go ping every time like that is definitely a way to have good knowledge of what recurring payments you are making.
Oddly, I get emails for everything except gasoline purchases. I'm afraid to contact support because in the extremely unlikely event that it gets forwarded to the correct people, the attempted fix would break something in my workflow.
On topic, its a great reminder to see say the Netflix charge happened and how much. An example is we subscribed to Viki for a couple months and forgot to cancel. Seeing that charge was a great reminder to poll the house if anyone was still using it.
It can be nice, but you might miss the nighttime ones.
It was easy to look at statements when they arrived by mail.
But with paperless billing, you've got to conscientiously log into your credit card site each month. If you have four cards, that's four logins. Who's going to do that? Not many.
The only reason I review my transactions it's because it's easy through an aggregator like Monarch (was using Mint before it shut down). And the only reason I do that is for budgeting -- reviewing transactions is just a side effect.
It still annoys me to no end that I don't have a single bank or credit card that will attach my statement as a PDF to a monthly email. As long as there's a secure email transmission connection, I don't understand why they won't do that.
I have the next month worth of bills and paychecks "below the line" as future transactions, so not only can know what's in my checking account today, but I know exactly, to the penny what will be in my checking account on 18-Feb.
I've in the past found credit card fraud/mistakes within a day of being charged, and have fixed them quickly, before even my next paper statement was printed.
Some friends I know don't have any idea how much is in any of their accounts outside of occasionally seeing a number on an ATM receipt. They might have a budget, but no idea how much all their monthly charges add up to in reality. And yea, they always seem to be forgetting about some subscription or charge. I couldn't live like that--not for me.
Someday, I keep telling myself, I'll be down to one bank account, one credit card, and that's it.
This is something I'd like to have, but I don't want to use Quicken. Partially because I pretty much exclusively use Linux at home, and I don't want to have something as important as financials reliant on a maybe-it-will-work WINE translation layer. And partially because Quicken is now owned by Intuit, which is a corporation I'm particularly disinclined to reward with my patronage.
Unfortunately, every time I've looked at ways to get statements delivered to me electronically from my various financial institutions, it seems that the available options are "don't" and "something that only works in Quicken." (There used to be some open file formats for exchanging information here, but it seems that institutions have started dropping support for them in favor of proprietary protocols, from what I can tell.) I'd be happy with something as meek as "email me a PDF statement"!
It is confusing as an end user, and they don't really do much to explain it. You have to do some digging to understand how it works.
Instead, I have a monthly reminder to pay my bills every month, with a list of all the bills/sites that need to be paid. There's 11 things in the list, but not all of them have a balance every month. I do this towards the end of the month (instead of at the beginning of the month), so that I can include rent in it too, and pay _everything_. It lets me see whether my spending is creeping up and gives me an opportunity to cancel useless stuff. It doesn't take long (5-30 mins depending on how detailed I'm being).
It may be evil for you, but for me, it's an absolute lifesaver.
I'd just had a post-it note stuck to my monitor of the dates and usual amounts for the auto-pays, so I was never caught off guard or surprised amount money moving.
I have a bank account that all incoming money goes into and another that's just for autopay. I transfer the sum of the costs of my recurring expenses into the autopay account from the incoming account, and that's it. Literally set it and forget it. This combined with using Privacy disposable cards for 90% of these transactions and setting hard spend limits on them has allowed me to never look at a bill.
I _used to_ have autopay deduct from a single account. Yeah, that's scary as hell and has caused heaps of problems. Not doing that again.
Doing it once a month is easy enough to remember (or put a calendar invite, if you're not able to) and forces me to do a quick validation. In my 20 years of working and being independent, I've never accidentally paid for a subscription longer than one month.
It doesn't work well with variable bills though because I can't schedule an amount I don't know yet to be paid. I'm stuck using a pull for my power bill for instance.
You go on vacation and bill pay day was in the middle of it. Or you're just busy and forget to move the calendar reminder to tomorrow. Or you get through half of them and get interrupted and forget you didn't finish.
I trust autopay far more than I trust myself!
Apple $4.99
Apple $1.99
Apple $14.99
Apple $4.99
Apple $2.99
Apple $9.99
good luck!
And thinking I'd to categorize my transactions as AppleCare+ vs software vs gaming vs cloud storage vs streaming, for budgeting purposes.
And then just kind of gave up. Apple seriously needs to put more detail in their transaction line, although I guess they can't always when they combine things in a single charge. But even just different merchants would help between iCloud, Apple Store, App Store, and Apple Services. Or something.
This was the best, and only feature I used on Mint. Quick glance a couple times a month was an easy way to find unusual charges etc. I haven't found a replacement.
$100/year, but they don't sell your information or push you to buy other products, and it has dramatically helped communication about money with my wife. I have a handful of friends who also use it and swear by it.
It's whitespace heavy though -- for people who like something that looks more like an enterprise software dashboard, there's Simplifi.
It seems like Monarch and Simplifi are where the most Mint users have wound up, judging from various forum posts. And they have an extremely similar feature set and interface. But they are both paid.
Of course, that's a pathetic excuse, and I tell myself that one of these days I will check my statements but that day never comes.
It's quite easy to be lazy in the moment and put this "work" off to tomorrow. As a result, days, weeks and months go by.
I now use privacy.com for most subscriptions and one-off trials etc. It at least notifies me via email every time there is a transaction.
This is an unrealistic attitude. One can insult people all day, but it doesn't change the fact that society doesn't work properly if we don't account for things humans do, even if it only looks like they are hurting themselves. On one hand, we shouldn't use law to force people to "be responsible for themselves" in petty cases (as opposed to e.g. forcing people to have car insurance), but if enough people commit the same mistake, it's almost by-definition not purely their fault - and on a more objective note, it is certainly pointless to waste time wondering how much of it is carelessness and how much of it is reasonable given what else is going on in people's lives and what their experiences and competencies are like. We simply must give a shit, as natural as it feels to want to just let people deal with things themselves.
Again, one can continue to consider these people mostly at fault or try to get them educated or just make fun of them or hyperbolically lament the fall of society or whatever one's preferred flavor of reaction is, but we also have to solve the active problem. Modern society is too integrated and complex to not give a shit.
Ideally, what I'd like to be able to say is that modern humans are too sympathetic and imaginative to not give a shit.
Yeah it takes a bit of time once or twice a month, but it's worth it I think.
Twice a year or so I catch "late fees" on my spouse's CC that shouldn't be there. Banks just seem to randomly do that because in most cases they'll get away with it.
If you use your credit card heavily, then this takes a lot more than 5 minutes. Keeping the CC usage light in order to make it easier to manage is important to me, and a key part of that is to avoid recurring charges as much as possible.
I think there is a rather easy way that we could solve this in a fairly robust way. It could be a legal requirement that when pricing on reoccurring subscription transactions changes that the user has to log in and confirm the change. The reason I'd actually suggest a legal route is because there's many companies that are highly incentivized to create dark patterns that will enroll people in subscriptions at a low or zero rate and then automatically transfer them to higher or paid accounts. It can happen to the best of us, but I'm more concerned with the not best of us. Personally I'm not a fan of a system that allows the easy extraction of money from people who are not as technically literate (i.e. most people). And I really don't think it is a good system to allow legitimate businesses to employ the same tactics as spammers.
If you read the article you'll find that the cases they talk about are specifically mentioning people who signed up for one thing but got a different thing instead. These are deceptive practices, full stop.
While we're at it, I'd love it if companies could stop sending spam from the same accounts they send important information. This dark pattern successfully teaches people to ignore any incoming email to them and explicitly allows this shit to happen. If contracts change, they should simply require a confirmation of that change. Maybe there's something I'm not seeing, but this sounds like a very reasonable and not very controversial take.
First, there is a lot of crap in a bank statement. They are tiring to parse.
Second, logging into and using your banking portal is a chore. First, you have to remember your password. Not everyone is using a password manager. (Love the work that Apple has done to bridge this gap, and I'm ABSOLUTELY LOVING passkeys.) Second, you have to present a second factor. Some (few) banks are with the times and use a TOTP second factor. Many use SMS two-factor. Many will CALL you with the code. All of them suck. Then you have to navigate the new UIs that look very pretty and are designed to simplify common functions (mostly checking your balance) but have made things like filtering your statement by transactions from today more difficult.
Third, many merchants use very confusing IDs that make it confusing to see where a transaction originated from (for example: a restaurant that uses an abbreviated form of their former name or their parent company's name in the merchant ID). Apple, for example, uses APPLE.COM/BILL for iCloud _and_ AppleCare transactions. This segues into my last reason why navigating transactions periodically sucks.
Tracing a previous expense is an AWFUL experience 99.95% of the time.
I capture every single receipt and bank alert into Expensify (moving into Google Sheets), so tracing an unknown charge is very easy for me (search my email; failing that, search Expensify; failing that, log into bank, which is painful; see above). However, I had to spend significant effort building systems and writing code to accomplish this since there are basically zero services that do this for consumer spending.
Most people don't save receipts. Those that do often don't save them digitally. I know this because I work in consulting, an industry where we have to track receipts to submit expense reports, and EVERYONE whines about this. Many have to block time in their calendar to get this done.
Regardless, even if you do save all of your receipts and alerts, you still need to log into the portal for the vendor that charged that $5.95 and find that charge. Portals that can be even harder to log in and navigate through than banks.
Determining which Apple service that APPLE.COM/BILL charge was associated with, for example? Good fucking luck. It's clicks on clicks on clicks. (They also make you use a single card for ALL digital purchases you make with them. Want to buy an album? Want to buy AppleCare for your new iPhone? Are you forced to subscribe to this super critical app on that iPhone that used to be free? The same card is used for all of that. This is the biggest reason why I've been investing time in moving App Store subscriptions into separate accounts. But even this sucks because many app vendors will only use the App Store for managing subscriptions!)
Consequently, when your statement, which you spent five minutes _just trying to get to_, presents an unknown $5.95 charge (that you didn't get alerted on if you had alerts on because your bank won't send alerts for anything below $50), it's easier to say "welp" and charge it back (a whole process in and of itself) or say "it's five dollars" and forget about it.