Money Challenge: Audit Your Automatic Bills & Subscriptions

Money Challenges
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Welcome to The Penny Hoarder’s first monthly money challenge of 2022. The aim is to help you find simple ways to save money each month.

To kick things off, let’s start with a question: How many subscriptions do you have? If you’ve lost track of the number over the years, you’re not alone. But we’re going to help you audit your automatic bill payments and subscriptions to help you save on services you no longer need.

Here’s what to do to take the challenge:

Go over your monthly statements

Check the statements from all your bank accounts, credit cards, etc. from December and identify all the automatic payments you’re signed up for. These could range from utilities to your phone bill to Netflix. Write them all down and note how much you’re paying for each in a given month.

From here, identify which automatic payments you no longer need and take the necessary steps to cancel. (Here are helpful instructions for canceling a variety of subscriptions.)

Bonus: Do the same auditing for a whole year to see if there are any major differences or other automatic payments you may have missed —especially annual subscriptions.

Audit phone app subscriptions

You may have signed up for apps on your tablet or smartphone that charge a monthly or annual subscription fee. These are especially easy to forget about. Here’s how to check your subscriptions on various devices.

iOs (Apple products like iPhone and iPad)

Open up the Settings app, tap your name (should be the top/first option). On the next screen, select Subscriptions to see what apps you’re paying for. Full instructions via Apple Support.

Android devices

Open the Google Play app then tap the profile icon on the top right. From there, tap Payments & subscriptions > Subscriptions to see what apps you’re subscribed to. Full instructions via Google Play Help.

More tips and tricks- ### Search “invoice” in your email inbox. Most automatic payments should show up here with a little digging.

  • If you share bills with someone else, have them do an audit, too. You may be surprised that you’re each paying for the same service.

How to complete the challenge

  • Go over one to 12 months of your financial statements and identify all automatic payments.
  • Check your smartphone/tablet to see if you’re signed up for any apps that require monthly or annual subscriptions.
  • Mark the automatic payments and subscriptions you don’t need and cancel them.

Let us know how much you saved in the comments. Or share your own tips with the community.

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Great challenge to start the year!

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Excellent challenge and time to put what you “do” find back into savings/investments. Adding back to retirement for me!

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Such a great challenge! The automatic subscriptions don’t seem like that much when you sign up for them – $5/mo here, $19.99/mo there. But then it definitely adds up can these methods can easily save hundreds a month.

Personally, I use Adobe Cloud + Adobe Stock photos for my businesses but I’m wondering if I can do away with them (would save about $60/mo).

Even more insidious are annual memberships, like ZenBusiness – who TBH I don’t think I need after the first year. Since I’m paying $100+/yr just to have them remind me of when certain documents are due and their customer service once you sign up isn’t that good.

I also have a lot of Godaddy/namecheap subscriptions for old websites I should probably cancel TBH. (probably at least $50/mo here).

I also use an email list thing called ‘drip’ which costs $19 a month. For my email list size, Mailchimp is free so I might just migrate there as well.

I also use Twilio which costs roughly $10-$20/mo – this is for my bot that tells me if it’s done an arbitrage – but I can easily swap this out to notify me on Discord instead (which is free).

In total cancelling all of these will probably save me about $140/mo. Though some of these will take a bit of work (i.e. migrating Drip email list, or refactoring my SMS code to interface w/ Discord instead).

–

https://goodmoneygoodlife.com

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thanks for sharing love learning from this great community

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My focus in 2022 is to really get a good grasp of my finances, especially the money going out of my bank account every month.

This is the perfect challenge to help with that!

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Well, so far I saved $12. But I will revisit this with the rest of my household and see what else we are willing to cut.

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@kellyfromkeene That’s a great start!

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Wow! Maaaan this is good in a bad way…lol… Sheesh…my subscriptions need some shredding for sure. As of today, i’ve saved $7.99 a month.

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Already just saved myself $128 by unsubscribing from iOS/Apple apps! Those things sneakily renew themselves and/or are for services I don’t even use anymore.

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I did pretty well – i.e. thankfully I didn’t find anything too alarming. Only a couple of small bills I no longer need and I identified our household is paying double for Spotify. In the end, I’ll save about $20 a month, or $240 a year.

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@angie.p posted:

In total cancelling all of these will probably save me about $140/mo. Though some of these will take a bit of work (i.e. migrating Drip email list, or refactoring my SMS code to interface w/ Discord instead).

Wow, that’s fantastic. In the end, you could be saving nearly $1700 a year!

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@aj.young.jr posted:

Wow! Maaaan this is good in a bad way…lol… Sheesh…my subscriptions need some shredding for sure. As of today, i’ve saved $7.99 a month.

That’s about $100 a year. That’s great and keep an eye out for those annual subscriptions. I had a Wix website that tried to auto-renew me for about $150 every 12 months.

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@moore.income posted:

My focus in 2022 is to really get a good grasp of my finances, especially the money going out of my bank account every month.

This is the perfect challenge to help with that!

@moore.income Were you able to cut some bills and save some money?

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@irishnanny and @barnyardpimp – Were you able to save any money with this challenge? We’d love to hear your results (if any)!

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Will S i was able to save by paying off my car from the checks the president gave out, i only use my credit card to pay bills and then pay it off, i have no other subscriptions to pay for ,and now every month i save the car payment ,i did well

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We are very frugal especially when it comes to subscriptions. The one thing we kind of splurge on is streaming television services however the last year we have been taking an approach that works well I’d like to share. Since we cannot possibly watch all of the content out there, we subscribe to only one streaming channel at a time. We will do Netflix for a month, watch all that we want, then cancel it. Then we will get Disney+ for a month, watch that until we’ve seen everything then cancel it. What we noticed is that we actually get excited about having the channels again with content that is always rotating so its new and fresh!

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I love this challenge! My wife needs to see this

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Companies are now turning to an appropriate solution for their billing and invoicing process, whether they are a little business or a major corporation. We understand how inefficient and error-prone the billing and invoicing process can be. We sought to provide our clients with the convenience of an automatically created invoice that is correct, personalized, and automatically calculates tax, discounts, and refunds.

You can automate your recurring billing process in a number of ways. You may configure a customizable subscription management system like SubscriptionFlow to streamline the process and provide you with all the progress information you need at any moment once you’ve identified the different charging models.

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