Time to read : 3 Minutes
When I joined Compare Club to write about mortgages, savings and all things financial it was a bit of a wake-up call.
I mean, how can I write about all of this without taking it onboard and putting it into practice? After all I can't really ask you to be better with your money if I'm not asking the same of myself.
Mission #5 – spend less on subscriptions
According to a recent Deloitte report, we spent $62 a month each on our streaming services this year.
🫰🏻Millennials spent the most, coming in at $84 a month, whilst Gen Z was a close second on $82 – and had on average, 4.5 streaming subscriptions each.
📼 Gen X spent a lot less with $56, and Boomers spent the least at just $43 a month.
👀 That means, on average, Australians are spending $744 a year on watching TV, and that doesn't even include our other subscriptions to newspapers, fitness programs, music streaming and more.
So how much do I spend on subscription services a month?
To be honest I was dreading doing this activity because I knew it was going to be bad, but to be completely honest it was much worse!
🙈 Mum, look away now.
$60 Yoga Medicine
$59 Fairfax for the Australian Financial Review
$35 Foxel
$30 Zoom
$28.95 Adobe Creative Cloud
$25.95 Apple Family
$20 Bali Animal Welfare Association
$14.99 on storage
$14.99 Adobe storage
$14 The Sydney Morning Herald
$11.99 Prime
$10.99 Netflix
$10 Stan
$7 The New York Times
$1.49 Apple Cloud
Total: $344.35 a month or let's just say $345.
Yep, I agree, that is pretty terrible.
In my defence, I share my streaming services with my mum who loves watching tv... but still far too many.
✂️ So, today I did a big cull.
💪 I went hard too, and in the process found out how awfully hard it is to cancel subscriptions.
My unsubscribe lessons...
You can't unsubscribe online. No, to some services, you have to send an email or make a call.
The special offer. That when you go to de-subscribe they give you a tempting offer to stay on, when I went to cancel Foxtel I was offered $10 off a month for six months – to that I said no.
Where is it? That finding the unsubscribe section on a website is near impossible, it was like travelling inside a dark and awful maze.
Passed off. That in an online chat to cancel a subscription you can get passed on to another team member.
Too many hoops. That even cancelling a payment is tricky because they require a double password, and even my password system had forgotten it!
Doubling up. Even more embarrassing, I had double subscriptions to the same thing or with cross-over – that no company had bothered to tell me I was doing.
Stop the source. That the easiest way to stop subscribing was to cut them off at the pay point – your bank, PayPal, credit card or where ever you have funds coming from.
What the... That confound it, every system has a different and more illogical unsubscribe process designed for, I am sure, to stop you from leaving them altogether.
It's not too hard. Yes, it took me two hours, but I saved myself a small fortune.
Privacy lag. And my last thought when I finished was I bet they still have all my details and damn it, there was no way for me to delete that either.
And yes, it was worth it
I trimmed a lot and saved myself a packet.
If I didn't share the services with my mum, I would have saved myself another $20. So all in all, I am very pleased.
🫶 The new subscription list
$28.95 Adobe Creative Cloud
$25.95 Apple Family
$20 Bali Animal Welfare Association
$11.99 Prime
$10.99 Netflix
$10 on Stan
$1.49 the Apple Cloud
Total: $109.37 or $110 month.
Saving: $235 a month or $2820 a year.
It's interesting how much we spend on things we don't notice, isn't it?
I am properly glad I took the time to de-subscribe, and I am sure that you will too.
Here are my tips:
⏲️ Take two hours and do a subscriptions audit.
✅ Keep what you really want, but get rid of the rest. One friend of mine rotates streaming services. Watches everything on it, then cancels, and moves to the next.
👌 If you need to save more, just stop all your TV streaming services and stick to the good old public channels – the ABC has heaps of great programs!
💰Week #5
Savings: $1400/$25K goal Travel savings $300/$5.2K goal
🎁 Next week... I tackle my transport costs.
