Day 69

Day 69:

How much do you pay for your subscription services? I bet it's more than you think.

As more and more companies and services switch over to a subscription model, regular payments can accumulate quickly without you noticing, until they end up taking a significant bite out of your income. You can normally make these payments in two different ways; monthly or yearly. Paying yearly almost always works out cheaper, since it's more money for the company up front, and it reduces their transaction fees and such. Of course, buying a year of subscription is a big, long-term commitment, and is often just impossible to make all in one go. It can also give you a nasty surprise if you forget about it, which happened to me recently.

Having just worked out my monthly finances (which were actually looking ok, considering the current circumstances), I checked my e-mails to discover that my Skillshare yearly subscription payment was coming up for renewal that month. It would be £123 that I hadn't accounted for. I am a Skillshare Teacher, meaning I receive a small part of my income from Skillshare royalties (and I plan to make more classes in the near future). This, combined with the fact that I used the service regularly to learn, meant that I decided to bite the bullet and find the money. Thankfully, this happened in a month when I could do so, but it prompted me to have a look through my subscriptions to figure out just how much I spend, and I was horrified by the result.

With software and game subscriptions, Netflix and a couple of other things, my yearly spend on subscriptions came out to more than £800. Granted, more than half of this comes from my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, which I need for my job and use pretty much every day, but it's still a huge number. When accounting for these things yearly, it gives a much better perspective of what you are actually spending. The monthly payment option, while making the subscription seem more affordable, masks the true cost of things by showing you small numbers on your account statement. If you are serious about a subscription and know that you will make good use of it, I would highly recommend taking the yearly option, if it's at all possible.  I've also opened up an account specifically for saving for subscriptions. If I'm not making a yearly pay-out that month, I pay around 1/12 of my total yearly subscription fees in, so it's there when another one comes up, to avoid nasty surprises. 

Most importantly, be sure to keep track of the services you have got, when you are supposed to pay for them and how much. You may find something that you just don't use as much as you used to, and ease the pressure on your pay packet.