For years, I was on the outside listening in to my co-workers talk about “Game of Thrones” because I wouldn’t pay the $15 for HBO. Heck, the only shows we got came through an antenna.
Since then, my stinginess abated, a bit, just as everyone else started cutting their cords. We’ve added cable (the highest tier so we can get NFL Red Zone), fast internet speeds, Amazon Prime, Hulu+. It’s so embarrassing.
But the subscriptions don’t stop there.
Our family went on a one-month cash diet – used only cash for a month – except for our subscriptions, which are mostly billed to our credit cards. As our cash diet ended and our monthly bills arrived, I expected some balances. I just didn’t expect the enormity of those balances.
The Sergent family’s laundry list of subscriptions
And those are just the monthly subscriptions. We probably have a dozen annual subscriptions. I recently stopped a semi-yearly digital genealogy subscription after failing to dig into our lineage through three expensive billing cycles. More on those decisions a little later.
Subscriptions are almost an inevitability for consumers these days. Consider this list assembled by wealth management company UBS that walks you through a day in the life of a fictitious consumer.
How the subscription economy can fill one day
Is it time to cut back on your subscriptions?
My parents could squeeze a penny with the best of them. My sister and I frequently joke about how fascinated my dad was with incremental differences in gas prices near our house and how that often dictated our routes.
But they still had newspaper subscriptions, milk delivery and even cable TV (only after a bunch of sports migrated to cable). But they never paid for more than the cheapest dial-up internet access.
So like my parents, maybe you could pick your most important services and find the lowest tier you can tolerate.
I haven’t followed their example, so now I’m following the Marie Kondo’s model to weed our subscriptions and appreciate them for what they gave us:
Thank you for reaffirming our family’s origins.
Thank you for tracking my teens.
Thank you for “Mrs. Maisel.”
4 steps to how we approached our oversubscribed household
A mound of subscription fees spread across five credit cards were hiding among our monthly purchases. What’s more difficult to trace are the subscriptions billed quarterly, semi-annually or annually. I’m still trying to track a couple of those down and add to my spreadsheet.
After scrutinizing our list of fees and subscriptions, I deemed our “needs” to be mobile phones, news subscriptions and a speedy internet connection. Next: a family text chat to figure out our general wants and the subscriptions for those wants:
- Streaming music
- Video on demand with specific shows or genres
- Live sports
I feel this is a work in progress. Others in our house might disagree, but what’s gone so far:
- Amazon Prime. Free shipping isn’t really the draw now, and I don’t need a pair of nail clippers in the next hour. So it came down to Amazon’s vast library of music and TV shows vs. Spotify’s music library and podcasts. Who knows: We may be back for “Thursday Night Football.”
- ESPN+ Sort of. One son upgraded the Hulu subscription to add ESPN+ and Disney+. Other son already had an annual subscription to ESPN+, which he no longer does.
- Location sharing app. The price more than doubled from when we first subscribed, and we rarely use it now.
- A cable TV-internet bundle. We now have several channels from one provider and speedy internet from another. That cut those monthly expenses by more than $70.
Our cellphone service and cable TV-internet service, which were more than half of our subscription spending, seemed ripe for reworking. We haven’t revisited our cellphone service in nine years. Consumer Reports offers a few negotiation tips:
- Call on a workday because you’ll probably reach more experienced representatives as well as their supervisors.
- Be ready to cut part of your service.
- Don’t be too quick take the first deal offered.
