I think a lot of people have recurring charges on their credit cards or money taken from their bank accounts each month. I don’t set up my bills on auto-pay since I like to review my bills to make sure there aren’t any odd charges before I pay, but I’ve had plenty of things set up to be recurring charges whenever they are set to renew. I think I have more of these on my phone, like the NY Times crossword puzzle app. But I do try to review these when they renew to make sure I didn’t forget to cancel something. And I do check the charges on my credit card each month, but most of the recurring charges on my card are annual ones so I don’t think about them too often.
I try to cancel anything I know I’m not using since it’s wasted money if I don’t. And if I’m trying out something, I always check to see if I can cancel it while I’m in the current trial or paid service to make sure that I don’t get charged for renewal but still have access to use it the entire time that I should. And I have removed a lot of things that I have realized I don’t need or want anymore. The biggest one that was recurring charges was magazine subscriptions. I don’t get any magazines in the mail anymore outside of things through my union. It was an extra expense that I didn’t need and since getting rid of them I haven’t missed them either.
But there are always things that I forget about until I get the email either saying my payment is going to go through soon or thanking me for making a payment. And with those annual recurring charges, since I don’t think about them I don’t think about canceling them either. But I recently had to cancel 2 annual charges for things that I just don’t find useful anymore.
One was for a note-taking app that I used to use all the time. The only reason I paid for it was that that was the only way to sync notes between devices. And since I used it on an almost daily basis in the past, that small annual charge was worth it to me. But when it was renewed recently, I realized that I hadn’t used it much in the last year that I was paying. I have found other things that work for me for tracking notes that are free and if I really needed my old app I could still access it for free through my computer. So I could transcribe notes from something else on my phone to my computer with a little effort. Since that had already been renewed, I had to submit a form to get a refund, but fortunately, that wasn’t too bad of a process and I got my money back within a week.
The other annual charge that I decided against renewing was my budgeting app. I think it’s a bit funny to cancel a budgeting app to do better on my budget, but I just wasn’t using the app anymore. I’ve been working toward finding an alternative that I like more, but I haven’t figured that out just yet. But while I had been working on a new option, I wasn’t using the app I had been using for a while. It’s not that it’s a bad app, it just doesn’t serve me the way that it used to with the budgeting goals that I have now. And to pay for it when I don’t think I’ll be using it anymore seemed silly. So that was canceled before I was charged and I didn’t have to worry about it again.
I know removing these 2 recurring charges won’t make a huge difference in my budget, but it is removing unnecessary spending which is important. And I do want to look at more recurring charges that I have to see if there are other things I’m missing that I’m paying for but don’t use. I don’t know if there are any, but I would have said that last month before I remembered about these 2 so I have a feeling there will be something else that comes up when I look into things more.
And when I eventually figure out a new way to work on a budget, having fewer recurring charges will be helpful since it will be less to track. It’s all these small changes that I can make that will help make things easier and hopefully also add up to save me a nice amount of money.
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