Are My Finances Being Sunk By Subscriptions?

One of the pieces of advice I frequently read in articles on saving money is to examine your subscriptions and get rid of those you don’t use.

It seems pretty obvious that spending money on things you don’t use and don’t want is…silly? An easy target for budget cuts?

I used to scoff at this advice, because I didn’t have mindless subscriptions. I knew exactly where my money was going.

Recently, however, I have had to reconsider this self-assessment.

Last month I got sucked into paying for Apple TV. This will get canceled after next month (I do want to watch a little Ted Lasso when I have time in October). When I realized I was getting charged for this, I started wondering how many subscriptions have crept their tentacles into my wallet.

Luckily, my Discover card has a feature that tells me about recurrent payments, which should capture most of the action.

I do have some other recurring payments, like phone bills and utilities, and some “Subscribe and Save” purchases from Amazon (I love having non-perishables delivered to my door periodically), but I will not count those. I am thinking more about those payments which are hard to cancel, and which buy me services that I may not even use.

My monthly list includes, in no particular order:

• $0.99 a month to Apple for more memory. Purchased recently after my phone died without a good back up, and I lost information I wanted.
• $4.99 for Apple TV. It was free for about 16 months, and of course I never watched anything until 2 weeks before I had to start paying for it.
• $5.99 for an extra channel on Prime. We don’t really like streaming video, but often use this to find a series to watch (and then we get DVDs from the library) or else we use it to keep watching a series if we can’t get our hands on the next season’s DVD for a few days.
• $17.00 for a NYT online subscription. Used at least weekly, if not more often.
• $10.35 through Patreon, supporting 3 authors whose works I enjoy. I don’t get the equivalent of a new paperback book every month, so in that way I am wasting money; on the other hand, I feel good about supporting them. Maybe I should be spending more to support a few more favorite authors. We will see.
• $21.35 for an online app I use multiple times a day. Worth it to me.
• $12.71 to Netflix for a DVD subscription. Mr. PiN never wants to watch these, even though he concedes that I usually pick movies he ends up loving. I think our last disc has been with us over a year, making it a $144 movie rental.

This comes to a total of $73.38 a month, which actually shocks me. I didn’t think the total would be so high.

I didn’t even include our gym membership, which is nearly impossible to cancel; we decided to continue it as a gesture of community support (it is through a community center, not a commercial chain).

There are a few yearly charges that I have put on auto renew. These are mostly things that I really don’t want to run out.

• $132 for an AAA membership (for sure, if I let it lapse, I will need a tow 2 days later).
• $126 for Amazon Prime. I enjoy the free shipping, though there are plenty of problems with that, I know. We do use the Video streaming sometimes.
• $80 for 2 magazine subscriptions. I can’t say that I read every issue promptly, but I do enjoy receiving them in the mail, and am 80-85% likely to read an issue within a week of receiving it. Unlike the vast quantity of unrequested journals that end up in my mail box every month.

This comes out to an extra $338 a year, or $28.17 a month.

Add this to the monthly list, and we are talking about $101.55 per month spent on subscriptions.

Is this more money than I thought was being spent on amusements? Yes.

Is this going to sink the budget of an attending? Probably not. But for someone on a resident’s salary, examining this sort of spending could lead to some savings that make life a little more comfortable. Even an attending, if they were having a hard time finding space in their budget for savings, might want to think twice about $100 a month.

Will this spending mean that I have to delay retirement? Using the rule of thumb (based off the 4% rule) that you have to save 25 times your annual spending–which translates to 300 times your monthly spending–I will need to save an additional $30,465 to cover these expenses in retirement. I wouldn’t call 30 grand a small sum, but compared to my worries about health care costs, I am not worried.

Is it time for me to look at this list closely and make sure I truly want all of these services? Absolutely. I started this already when I started listing each monthly expense. I suspect that before the end of the year, I will cut about $23 a month from the list. Again, it’s not a make-or-break amount for me; but it’s being spent on things we don’t use, which I think is wasteful.

What do you think about my list? Do you spend more, or less? Have you reviewed the value (to you) of your subscriptions recently?