I wrote my credit union a message advising them that a good feature they could add would be having a tab in their banking web interface (or their mobile app) that shows me all charges that repeat (monthly or yearly) so that I can more easily keep track of what is charging me. Additionally I think it could be useful to just show repeat vendors, regardless of regularity of payments.
I usually catch them when I scroll down my usage statements once per month, but having it in-your-face would be beneficial to quite a lot of people I think.
I have to ask - is that not a thing where you're from? We've had that baked into online banking for years here in the UK. Heck most mobile banking mobile apps even show graphs showing how much you spend on subscriptions, direct debits, shopping, bills, etc.
Credit unions are different, and can be fairly barebones with regards to online options, however if you do have these interests for new features, you have a greater chance of speaking to someone who can make it happen. The local near me offers a balance on savings and draft, and an option to transfer between the two or to an external account, that's it.
My online banking apps and websites are legitimately terrible at finance summaries, categorization, and graphing. They absolutely have no clue how to classify anything I purchase. There are ways to export data and process it on my own, such as in Sheets, but I just try to avoid that game.
Here in Spain it's not. I don't really want my bank looking over my shoulder though. I don't trust them at all but I have no choice because you need a bank.
So if they don't show any analysis there's a higher chance they don't analyse it internally for their private use either. I hope.
My trick is to get text messages/app notifications live when a credit card charge goes through (Chase at least supports this).
Then, I either dismiss the message, or deal with it immediately. I find this much easier than going over a statement at the end of the month. Usually the context for the charge is front and center, instead of and puzzling whether "AMZN MKTP US*TO10VLA93" is something I really bought 28 days ago or if someone used my CC.
my bank used to send me an sms for every transaction, until they decided to only send an sms for transactions over $50. i found the change very irritating. i would have accepted a lower limit of say $10 or $15. and it would have been bearable if they had sent an sms every time $50 in transactions accumulated, but as it was, i could go for weeks without any notification as long as every transaction was below $50. getting this live confirmation was very useful because it also included the remaining balance.
I'm not saying this with any certainly, just suggesting that it's a possibility: in the early days of cell phone service, people had to pay a fixed amount for each SMS sent (and, I believe, received as well)--perhaps $.1, or so, per message. Then, a few years later, you could pay for more expensive plans that included a certain number (some variants included baseline plans with a la carte options). Eventually this was abolished, in favor of plans that included unlimited SMS (the proliferation of HS Internet access probably had a lot to do with these changes as well).
However, it is also true that when it comes to commercial accounts, pricing for certain options like SMS may still follow the original scheme--i.e. the telecom may charge a fixed amount per individual message. I'm not saying this is definitely the case, nor that it is reasonable, if it is the case (the contention early on was that SMS were part of some other communication that occurred automatically, so people should never have had to pay anything for this "service," which was periodically ongoing by default). I'm just pointing out that this is how it used to be for private accounts, and i wouldn't be surprised if it was still the case for commercial accounts.
My bank was like that for my debit card...I ended up just using dev tools to remove client side validation and put a 0 in there, and I guess they don't do any server side validation for that field
PayPal does this for me automatically. It's a lifesaver.
As far as banking goes, I tried mightily to use BillPay for everything possible (push) rather than AutoPay (pull) but those services are ruthless and relentless, so I gave up, and I am down to only one monthly BillPay remittance.
One thing I appreciate about apple is that when you subscribe to services through them and immediately cancel you are allowed to retain the service for the remainder of the period. I now will utilize that heavily; I am okay with paying $4 or whatever for 1 month of an app I will use for a bit knowing I can cancel it right now and it will just stop working when my time is up. If I need more, I can buy more. I think amazon does it as well at least with network video subscriptions.
Although in true apple fashion this does not apply to their own services trial periods as far as I’ve tried. If you pay for a month of Apple Music and cancel within the free week they’ll just turn it off immediately and never charge you. Not sure if they do that during the actual month
So now I refuse to subscribe to anything unless there’s an intermediary that will allow me to quickly and painlessly cancel. iCloud subscriptions or Amazon account will let me do it with a button click. Whereas in my experience canceling directly with the company in question is often a nightmare
I just wish their Apple ID interface is faster though. It seems to be a Webview and takes forever to load and update. Last time when I clicked on cancel on a subscription, it appeared to do nothing for 10 seconds, until the subscription information suddenly updates to show that it's indeed cancelled. I imagine people who aren't quite as patient as me, or who think that the Apple ID screen is stuck, will click on things in a rage and perhaps even wrecking things.
Heck, even trying to pay for something takes forever. I clicked on an in-app purchase button and then it showed a spinner for 30s before the Apple "touch your finger here to confirm purchase" screen appears. After confirming, nothing seems to happen until a minute later.
"Forever" relative to how you cancel a subscription to anything that's not in the AppleID Subscriptions manager?
> Heck, even trying to pay for something takes forever. I clicked on an in-app purchase button and then it showed a spinner for 30s before the Apple "touch your finger here to confirm purchase" screen appears. After confirming, nothing seems to happen until a minute later.
That's not normal for most Internet connections and devices.
Can confirm that if you get say one of the widely available 2 or 3 month Apple TV trials you can cancel it immediately and it doesn't end early. I'm going on 2 years without ever having to pay for it as someone always has codes to keep it going.
Be careful, Google cancels all your services if there’s any issue, and if you’re an Android user that makes your phone effectively a paperweight. I don’t think Apple is that bad but I shudder to think of all the dependencies I have on my Apple ID, and how easy it would be to hijack even if you have Yubikeys set on it because they still allow insecure SMS-based password resets vulnerable to SIM-swapping attacks.
I've tried this with free trial stuff mainly. So, once the trial ends they attempt to withdraw money and they can't so I don't get the service. I have no indication that any service thus far had viewed it as me having an outstanding debt. YMMV
Which is exactly the situation I'm in. I want to cancel audible, but want to use up my credits first, so it keeps rolling over. Anybody have 6 suggestions for audiobooks?
I would recommend the Audible audiobook of Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which I think I first saw recommended also on hackernews. Usually I listen to audio books at 1.5x speed but I have been really enjoying the narrator of this series and listened to this and the sequels at 1x speed.
The worst are the ones that I remember when they bill me, then when I go to look into cancelling they are somehow unable to manage a cancellation process which does not require either calling, faxing, or mailing a certified letter somewhere.
Meanwhile their signup process takes 5 seconds online.
The FTC has proposed a rule to require "Click to Cancel" for services that have "Click to signup". I hope it or something like it gets applied.
I really hope the FTC does act on this. In the meantime, I use privacy.com to create virtual cards for each service I sign up. Canceling is then as easy as turning the card off.
Ryan Hamilton has some really funny standup about attempting to cancel a gym membership.[2]
This doesn't work and can get you into legal or financial trouble. If you invalidate your payment method but don't actually cancel the service on their end, you still owe them money: your account is in arrears and could go to collections and then debt collectors, and wreck your credit rating.
> You instruct the debt collector that the debt is disputed, the credit rating is not affected.
The debt collector couldn't care less if the debt is disputed. You instruct the rating agency, and then hope they see things your way. If they don't, your credit score will be affected.
I'm surprised at how often people say "just block payment and dispute the charges". Do people really believe getting out of a debt is as simple as saying "trust me bro, I don't owe them anything"?
I do actually, because I've been through the process of disputing a debt before. All the creditor has to do to verify the debt is to show their records to the reporting agency, i.e., their justification for charging you. It's not like the agency has a team of detectives that are going to stop at nothing to get to the bottom of the issue. If it looks legit, then for their purposes it is.
I've had a completely illegitimate debt "verified" simply because they were able to show a paper trail saying I owed it according to their own internal rules, none of which were written in anything I signed or agreed to. It probably didn't help that it was a government office (DoD), but their idiotic "that's just how it is" justification was good enough for the reporting agency. Years later after an audit they admitted their mistake and refunded me, although they never refunded the late fees they charged me for a debt that they now acknowledge I never owed in the first place.
If you pull the braindead maneuver of not cancelling a service before cutting off payment, they're going to have no problem coming up with the records they need. Is it fucked up that they can deliberately make it difficult to cancel? Yes. But that doesn't mean it won't cost you points on your credit score. That's why there's a demand for a "click to cancel" law.
My CC company has been happy to handle this for me. A gym in a country I no longer reside in ignored all attempts to reach them to cancel a renewing, but non-contract, gym membership. The CC did a charge back and stopped future charges. Took a few minutes on the phone.
Additionally, I've taken to using my providers throwaway card generator to make site-specific ones that I can then one-click disable whenever I feel like it.
Granted, they only have this exposed through a fairly buggy browser extension, you can't just "do it" easily on the website, so I won't bother giving them the free marketing of mentioning them.
Thats why I always create a calendar event and make it remind me so I will know to cancel (or not).
Few days ago I saw that one gas station offers 10€ monthly subscription for a daily coffee. Brilliant I thought: Cheap. However not every day a person gonna take the coffee. And you ensure the person will for sure fuel up right at your gas station and maybe buy some snacks.
What’s funny about those kind of deals is if people actually maximize the benefit, those deals get adjusted way upward, or eliminated entirely.
4-5 years ago, Smashburger did their first, “Smash Pass.” Daily (excluding national holidays) free entree burger — via a daily one-day-only expiring coupon - with no additional purchase required, for 100 out of 102 calendar days, for $100 including sales tax. So the theoretical benefit was $800ish worth of food for $100, plus not paying sales/service taxes. Best part of a 90% discount depending on where you lived. I couldn’t make a comparable burger on my own for anywhere near that price.
I lived right near a Smashburger at the time, and it was literally on my walk back from a subway station I would exit on my commute back home. I got 100 of the 100 burgers. Only twice did I ever order something with it, because I was only a 7-minute walk from home and could have something else or a drink at home for much less.
Next year? 30 one-day-only-expiring-coupon burgers for $50. I was apparently far from the only person willing to structure part of their day around a free burger. I guess some of their stores were eaten alive by the promotion.
> Thats why I always create a calendar event and make it remind me so I will know to cancel (or not)
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one here who uses a calendar.
I wish that was a joke, but the number of posts and comments I've seen from people who forgot to cancel at the end of a free trial, or had a site stop working because they forgot to renew a certificate, or forget to renew a domain, and many other things I'm forgetting is way higher than I would have expected.
Want to try a service for a month that doesn't do free trials? Hit that dark pattern with a single-use Privacy card and let the account lapse.
Want to join a gym but avoid their extremely predatory cancellation process? Boom; Privacy card that shit and term the card when you cancel.
Did you see a cool widget on a site that's notorious for getting pwned? Single use Privacy card that shit (or use Ironvest's Blur Virtual Cards if you want to use a credit card behind the scenes. Slightly more expensive and cumbersome though.)
No monthly subscription shall ever see the last four of my actual cards ever again. Gotta fight fire with fire.
How is not offering a free trial a “dark pattern”? Companies are free to offer to customers what they see fit. If you don’t like it, you can simply go somewhere else.
Also, asking for a credit card up front when doing free trials is a great way to weed out all the fraudsters out there.
A free trial with automatic billing at the end is a dark pattern. The non dark pattern would be to get approval from the customer before billing after the free trial ends.
This is one of the two reasons why I avoid all subscriptions unless they're absolutely necessary. The other reason is because it's too easy to keep adding new subscription because each one in isolation appears to be a small amount, but they collectively add up to entirely too much far too quickly.
Subscriptions are a fixed ongoing expense, and fixed ongoing expenses is the most common way people go broke.
> Subscriptions are a fixed ongoing expense, and fixed ongoing expenses is the most common way people go broke.
I'll assume that the latter claim is true. But, does anyone actually "go broke" because of Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc, etc subscriptions? I'm skeptical. Obviously, the article asserts that people often forget to cancel subscriptions, and it has certainly happened to me, but I doubt many people get to a point where they're considering bankruptcy or downsizing their home before they realize they have a subscription they should've canceled.
It seems obvious to me that the "fixed ongoing expenses" that cause people to go broke are things like housing and debt payments (car, student loans, credit card, medical bills), and probably not optional monthly subscription fees--however high they may get.
My "go broke" comment was a little bit of hyperbole. Not much, though.
> the "fixed ongoing expenses" that cause people to go broke are things like housing and debt payments
It's not usually the big stuff that gets out of control, it's the little stuff. It's very easy to sign up for a $5/mo subscription without thinking twice. Signing up for a $2000/mo lease gets more thought put into it.
You're unlikely to rack up a whole bunch of the $2k expenses, but lots of people do get into financial trouble by racking up thousands of dollars in expenses, $5-$20 at a time.
Ive long since cancelled all my streaming tv/movie streaming services. But one of the things that really helped me decide if a service was important is when you cancel a service- delete the app a few days before the subscription is set to expire. If you need the app before the expiration, then it's probably a service you want. If not then it's out of view and it could be a month or more before you even want to use it.
But really it comes down to having a budget and keeping track of your expenses. Subscription can be easy to forget but if you don't keep track, larger more damaging charges can slip through.
Is this actually legally viable? I'd be worried that you could be technically considered to be under contract and get fined for late fees/penalties on top of other charges, get referred to collection agencies, etc...
Doesn't that just make you in default? You hope they decide to cancel you and write off your debt, but legally couldn't they just keep charging you every month, ding your credit, and eventually sue you for the balance?
Not paying is not the same thing as canceling service. Many services will not let you continue using them if payment fails, but others will, and you will still be on the hook for the charges from a collection agency.
The only time virtual cards are particularly useful is if you're giving your CC# to some very shady merchant, probably one without any recourse if you decline payment. But, perhaps, just don't give those people your cc# in the first place.
They can also be useful if your CC data gets leaked in a breach.
If it isn't a virtual card your bank will probably cancel your existing card and issue you a new card with a new number. Some merchants where you had the old card on file might get the new number automatically via a credit card update service, but it is likely some will not and then you need to remember to go manually update them if you want them to keep working.
If you had used a virtual card on the site that got breached it should in theory not affect the underlying card or any other virtual cards derived from it.
This is a primary reason I use PayPal: never give up your cards to any merchant. Choose your method of payment freely. New/changed card deets? Change them in one place only, and Bob's your uncle.
This is really nice in Europe, after the first year they must allow you to cancel monthly. So no more renews for another year crap.
I guess in America you don't get these nice things because you don't have your politicians voting for your interests but their corporate sponsors' instead. Time to vote for the people that support you :)
Also, cancellation must be offered through all the channels they offer signups on. So no more certified letter scams, if you can call them to sign up you can call them to cancel. And they can't push you around with a "customer loyalty" team. They can offer a deal but if you say no they must cancel.
This is one of the reasons I use privacy.com for signing up for services about which I am not sure of the cancellation process. I have outright "cancelled" a virtual credit card several times now.
And economist Mahoney acknowledges it might be annoying if consumers had to actively renew a subscription every month.
My "mandatory" subscriptions do work this way --- they send me the invoice and then I pay after reviewing it. I refuse automatically-renewing ones. Then again, I have very few of them anyway, which IMHO is a good thing.
I have both of my credit cards and my bank set up to email me with every single transaction. So even if I forget to cancel a subscription it's only going to ding me once to make me remember to cancel.
Apple Card’s killer feature is payment notifications and transactions by vendor built-in. As long as I use it for all subscriptions, I’m going to catch anything that’s no longer in use.
I usually catch them when I scroll down my usage statements once per month, but having it in-your-face would be beneficial to quite a lot of people I think.