Day 46: Paying for Stupid Can Be Heavy
by Edward Smith
20 Aug 2020
Scale Things Back and Reduce Your Weight
If you read my last article entitled: 🤠How Subscriptions Lock You Out of Your House, you would have read about how subscriptions can add up, block your progress, and keep you from going places.
Not Knowing Is Not a Victimless Crime
Don't be a victim. Your budget is available and wants to help.
During my last budget session I undid a two year mistake with my auto club. I was paying too much and I didn't really understand what I was paying for.
Then I got my bill for two hundred bucks. That wasn't acceptable. It caused me to recoil and to stop what I was doing and look into it. Turns out, the thing we wanted the auto membership for was covered in the basic plan, and that we were paying extra for extra things that we didn't even use.
I wanted roadside service. If my car broke down, someone would show up, and give me a tow, or give me a battery. That was covered in the basic plan.
The premium plan was actually targeting other snobby things like car rental discounts, hotel perks, and store discounts. I never shopped in those places, and we never used any of that stuff, so why were we paying for it? Easy. It was offered at a slightly higher price then the basic plan, and the details were hidden from plain sight.
You couldn't see it easily unless you dug into it. That's how these companies market junk to you. They define it as "adding value" They throw things onto your bill as riders, and then raise the price by a few dollars to pay for it. You're not even getting it for free. You might as well have signed up for a separate service that only covers the extras. At least then you'd see it.
We decided to downgrade our membership. Awesome idea.
It dropped the price of our annual membership by eighty bucks. When we crunched the numbers, that meant we had been throwing away 7 bucks a month on something we didn't even use. That's the same price as the online streaming service I talked about earlier.
If we had saved that money or invested it we could have over one thousand dollars saved up, and that is just one account. The same thing could be happening in all of the accounts. It adds up, and it's making your life harder then it needs to be. Become informed, and stop the cycle.
Conclusion
Subscription dollars are dangerous because they make you complacent. Their entire structure is based on doing things automatically without making you think. Really useful if you're paying for basic things like utilities, but really dangerous if used to pay for the wrong things.
The thing with subscription services, is they get complicated and you don't always know what you're paying for, because the people talking you into getting them don't always go through the fine print with you. You wouldn't let that happen with a restaurant bill, so why do it here?
Budgets help you see it all, and they help identify problem areas. If a number comes in high and you don't like it, challenge it by investigating it. You might be paying for silly things like prestige.
Take a second look at what you're paying for. You might be surprised, and it could save you thousands.
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