My phone buzzed in the break room at the pharmacy on Tuesday, halfway through a turkey sandwich. "We miss you, Lindsey! Your streak is waiting." It was the fitness app. I've opened it twice since January, and it has charged me $14.99 every single month. That's eight charges, $119.92, for two workouts. Sixty dollars a workout.
That was the push I needed. That night Tyler and I sat down with the checking account, the credit card statements and the subscription list in my phone's settings, and went looking for everything that charges us on its own.
How we lost track of $61
Here's the embarrassing part. "Subscriptions, $61" has been a line in the sheet since our first real budget in February. I typed it in, it looked small next to rent, and I never looked at it again.
It's easy to lose track because the charges don't come from one place. One streaming service bills our checking account on the 3rd. The other bills on the 19th. The cloud storage is on the credit card. The fitness app comes through the app store on my phone. None of them is big enough to notice on its own, and they never show up on the same day.
The way we found them was boring but it worked. I went through three months of statements with a highlighter and marked any amount that showed up more than once with the same cents. A $15.99 in June, July and August is a subscription, even if the name on the statement is a jumble of capital letters you'd never recognize.
Here's what we found, and what's left after one evening:
| Subscription | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Streaming service, no-ads tier | $19.99 | $0 |
| Second streaming service | $15.99 | $15.99 |
| Cloud storage | $9.99 | $2.99 |
| Fitness app | $14.99 | $0 |
| Total | $60.96 | $18.98 |
What we canceled
The first streaming service, $19.99. We had it on the tier without ads, and all summer we watched exactly one show on it. Tyler stuck up for it, because that one show is his. We settled it this way: when the next season comes out, we sign up for one month, he watches the whole thing, and we cancel again. That's $20 once instead of $240 a year, and he gets his show.
The fitness app, $14.99. Moose takes me on two walks a day for free, and there are workout videos online that cost nothing if I ever get the urge. Canceling took three tries, because the button was buried two menus deep in my phone's settings.
What we kept
The second streaming service, $15.99. This is the one we actually use, most Friday nights and whenever Tyler can't wind down after a late shift. It costs less than one night out for the two of us, and we'd both miss it.
Cloud storage, cut from $9.99 to $2.99. All our photos are on it, including every picture from our wedding. I wasn't giving that up. But we were paying for 2 terabytes and using 64 gigabytes. The smaller plan holds 200 gigabytes, which is three times what we use, for $7 less a month. It stays on the credit card so the card has one small charge each month, and autopay pays it off in full.
While we were at it, I called about the internet too, since it bills every month like a subscription. The cheaper speed was only $5 less and would have made Sunday nights with the sheet a lot slower, so we kept it at $65. Not everything has to go. It just has to be on purpose.
What it adds up to
We went from $60.96 a month to $18.98. That's $41.98 a month less, or $503.76 a year.
From now through the end of next year, when we're hoping to buy a house, is 16 months. Sixteen times $41.98 is $671.68. That's almost a month of rent, for things we weren't using.
The $42 goes into the house fund starting in September. I also wrote a reminder on the fridge calendar for the last Saturday of every third month: open the subscription list, read every line out loud to Tyler, and get a yes or no on each one. Reading it out loud is the part that works. It's a lot harder to keep paying for something when you have to say the name and the price to another person.
