Don’t let subscriptions ruin your monthly budget
Maintaining a healthy financial balance in life is hard without a proper budget in place. Everyone except the super-rich has a monthly budget to be strictly followed in order to maintain balance. It doesn’t mean that the super-rich doesn’t have a budget, they might have one, but it doesn’t really matter if they break it.
Grocery
Since the economic revolution, citizens in every single country was planning out a monthly expense budget to maintain health with a proper diet. Groceries, packaged foods, and restaurants used to take a big chunk of the monthly budget.
The whole idea of subscriptions started with physical newspapers.
But you might have recently noticed that your monthly expenses are rising. Grocery is definitely not the answer, but Netflix could be a solid answer to it. Digital services around the world are rising and the future of subscription programs is hitting the roof.
Let’s accept it. Subscriptions are the new generation way of using digital services and it’s not leaving this space unless something solid happens. Even the torrent pirate movie download numbers are declining due to the massive subscriptions rise at Amazon Prime and Netflix.
Renewals
Guess what? you don’t even need a cycle on your own, even cycles got subscriptions. You’ve multiple to choose from, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+ and Netflix are offering a wide range of entertainment solutions to your screens for a fixed subscription charge.
Gamings have subscriptions, electric bike recharging subscriptions, music subscriptions and a lot more.
It keeps on going without even bothering you, but at the end of the day when you clearly take a look at your credit card bill (you know what I mean). Especially when it’s going out of your credit card, you don’t really feel the depth. It’s small money, around $4 to $10 a month for something that you use every day makes a lot of sense.
But are you really using it? If yes, how did you access the same content before?
Optimize
Well, I could help you save something out of your subscription expenses every month. If I don’t minimize at least a dollar from your subscription, I’ve absolute clarity that you’re doing very well with your subscription accounts.
Optimizing your monthly subscription spends is very easy. It could happen with a piece of paper and a pen to write down your subscriptions. Kindly follow the steps and use an actual paper or pen, because we don’t entertain writing it on a note-keeping application which you bought for $4 a month (that’s what we are trying to kill).
- Write down all your subscriptions including yearly and monthly subscriptions.
- Put them on a calendar and calculate the total amount you are paying for subscriptions alone.
- Pen down the categories of subscriptions like entertainment, music, productivity, etc.
Now you gotta ask few questions to yourself.
- Do you really need all of these subscriptions?
- Have you subscribed to any of them to stay competitive? (there are subscribers who purchase a certain app or a package just to stay competitive with their peers, which doesn’t make any sense)
- How did you access the same types of content before the launch of the respective subscription?
Well, you just need to answer these questions to get a real quick clarity on whether to continue a certain subscription or not. Felt like you have a lot of unused subscriptions? cancel them. The government has strictly mentioned to the tech giants that cancellation policy and an inbuilt option to cancel within the website is mandatory.
Keeping a Netflix account just because your friend is having it doesn’t make sense to your budget. If you used to access movies with unethical practices like pirate etc, then it’s always good to have a subscription, but if it feels unnecessary, there is no better option than removing it.
Bottom Line
Writing down all the subscriptions on a piece of paper is the key thing to do, write it every month end when you create the new budget or review your budget. Keep a track of what you’re utilizing and what you’re not. Companies can only survive in this competitive market with good quality content and service delivered at a fixed monthly cost, the value is definitely good enough, but paying them without using them isn’t a healthy diet for your budget.
