Excerpted from 55 and Out, Simplification
I Cancelled 14 Subscriptions in One Sitting. Here's What I Saved.
· 3 min read
I exported a year of credit card transactions, sorted by merchant, and counted the recurring charges. Forty-one subscriptions. I knew about maybe twenty of them.
Here's what got cut.
- Two streaming services I hadn't opened in six months — $32/mo - A meditation app I'd used three times — $13/mo - A productivity tool I'd been "evaluating" for a year — $24/mo - A second cloud storage account that duplicated the first — $10/mo - A magazine I never read — $8/mo - An old domain registration for a project that died in 2019 — $14/yr (counted as $1.20/mo) - A premium news subscription I had on autopilot — $25/mo - A "VIP" plan for a service whose free tier was fine — $19/mo - A gym I hadn't visited in eight months — $89/mo - An online course platform I'd stopped using — $35/mo - A grammar checker that came bundled with my browser anyway — $12/mo - A "lifetime" deal that turned out to have a $40/yr maintenance fee - A fitness app whose features were also in my watch — $15/mo - A second password manager from before I switched
Total: $312 a month. $3,744 a year. At a 7% return over twenty years, that's roughly $164,000 of compounded waste.
The hardest cancellation was the gym, because the gym did nothing wrong — I just wasn't going. Paying it had become a way of telling myself I'd start going again. Cancelling it was admitting I wouldn't. That sting lasted about a day. I started walking three miles every morning instead. Free.
The surprise: how many "cancel anytime" services hide the cancel button. Two of them required calling a 1-800 number. One required filling out a form that asked why I was leaving. I lied on the form to get out faster, then felt guilty for lying, then realized that a service that makes you lie to leave isn't a service worth feeling guilty over.
What I do now: every December, I run the same export. The list is shorter every year. I think of it as a small annual harvest.