Subscriptions, Counted by the Year

A subscription is designed to be felt in months and charged in years. 129 a month is 1548 a year, and nobody ever shows you the second figure.

Open three full months of bank and card statements — the actual statements, not your memory and not the list in the app, which never shows everything. Go from top to bottom and write out every line that repeats: streaming, cloud storage, apps, the gym, insurance, donations, phone plans, paid newsletters, auto-renewals in the App Store and Google Play. Next to each, write the monthly amount and the yearly amount. Add up the yearly column and write the total. Now go through the list and tick the ones you used this week — not this year, this week. Add up the yearly figures for the unticked lines: that is the price of what you do not use.

The yearly total nearly always turns out comparable to something you routinely call unaffordable: a trip, a course, a dental crown. You do not have to cancel anything today — the task was to see, not to cut in a rush; cancelling comes tomorrow, with a clear head. If you could not identify a line (an unfamiliar payee, latin letters, no name), do not leave it in the «probably necessary» pile — call the bank and ask who it is. And check whether two subscriptions to the same thing sit in different family accounts: that is the most common find.