🤠 How Subscriptions Lock You Out of Your House

 Day 45:   Subscription Ignorance is Expensive

by Edward Smith

19 Aug 2020

Subscriptions Add Up

In this article I want to talk about subscriptions.   We all have them.   Some of them are necessary.  

Mortgage payments, electric bills, insurance, water and gas bills.   These things keep your house running.

When used correctly, subscriptions are really useful.   I don't want these things to run out.  I don't want to find out I missed a payment because of some kind of paperwork mistake, or because a letter got lost along with my check.  

Subscriptions make things efficient.  They ensure that things happen like they're supposed to, and that they happen every time.   

Sometimes though subscriptions can get really stupid and mess things up.   Get to know your subscriptions.  Figure out what they're up to.   Here is how.

Subscription Parasites

If you don't already do a budget, you should totally start one today.   You'll be surprised by what you are doing, and where your money goes.   

Subscriptions can turn out to be really expensive when you start putting them next to their friends.   The way they get you, is that they are small and look harmless individually.   

For example, in my house, I subscribe to an online video service.   It's not a big deal.  It only costs about 9 bucks a month.   I've purchased food for more then that.   

When I look at a subscription service in that way, I begin to ignore it because the amount is so small.  Each subscription, though small, works like a brick.  If you pile all of the bricks together, they can start to build into something really big.   

You can't see that unless you have a budget though.   The budget lets you see how all of the bricks stack up together.   Create a budget and get to know your bricks.

Building a Brick Wall Next to My TV

Here is a great example.  I live next to a brick wall that I built out of television service bricks.  That brick wall consists of my internet, my online video streaming service, and my cable television.   

The cable costs about 10 dollars, the streaming service costs about nine, and the internet costs another eighty five.   That basically means I pay over one hundred dollars for things that don't even put food on the table and they almost cost as much as the food I really need.

Worse. I don't really understand them well, because they get presented to me as a package.  

In order to get the basic thing I want, I have to add on options, and those options can be for things I might not really want.  I pay for them though.

Even when I do understand a package, the option doesn't look ideal.  It gets presented with other options, and those other options are marketed to look more attractive.   

For instance with my streaming service I could have another five dollars added on.  If I do that I can have DVD discs sent to my house.   I don't really need to do that, but it's only a couple of dollars so why not?  I often forget that I added them on, and I usually don't even use them.  The company makes free money and doesn't even do any extra work for it.  Not a bad deal for them.

With my cable, I could have extra channels added on for a small nominal fee.  With the internet, I could have a faster internet connection.  Just a few dollars.   That's doesn't look scary.  All of these extra dollars start to add up though.   I have to pay them, and they start to get expensive if I keep trying to have the best of everything.   Prestige will make you poor.  

Try scaling things back.  It can make your life easier to manage.

   

Want to Know How We Scaled Things Back?   Check Out My Next Article