By Kolin Kriner
While scrolling through my bank statement for last month, I began to become overwhelmed. As a college student trying to control his finances, the amount I had spent in January made me begin to sweat. The realization hit me; I was drowning in a pool of monthly dues paid to people I don’t even know. That’s the cost of entertainment in our day and age.
As far as I knew, I was paying for only five subscriptions: Netflix, Spotify, Hulu, Adobe and Canva Pro. Doesn’t seem like that much, until I realized five subscriptions was actually 10. This is an issue faced by many, the subscriptions that were long forgotten about.
“On average, $86 per month was the initial amount consumers estimated they spent on subscription services,” according to a 2022 study done by C+R Research. “But upon closer look at their itemized expenses, the average monthly spend for consumers was… at $219.”
College students are increasingly at risk of these forgotten subscriptions. Between entertainment and educational services, these costs begin to quickly add up. For example, I’ve been subscribed to a Chegg account since I was a first year. I’m a senior now.
A Chegg subscription is $9.99 a month. This means that I have approximately spent nearly $360 across the years on a subscription I haven’t even used.
This is largely due to their automatic nature of securing payments from right inside your pocket without you even knowing.
“Unfortunately, subscriptions can inflict more damage to your finances than other types of purchase since they are set up to charge your credit card automatically,” said Robert Farrington in his Forbes article, “Subscription Overload: Are You Making This Common Budgeting Mistake.”
Although these subscriptions may be forgotten, they can still be found. There are things you can do to prevent this monthly robbery from your wallet.
It is a good idea to regularly review your bank statements, that way you can spot subscriptions you no longer need before they keep taking out money.
There are also apps that have been created to help find subscriptions, and even cancel them.
You may not even realize it, but you could have hundreds of dollars stolen from you a year. It’s not too late to stop this though. Take control of your finances and cancel the subscriptions you know you don’t need.
