We all have regular monthly payments going off our accounts minutes after our salary arrives — in fact, so many SMS notifications that your phone is in shock and you’re too scared to see what’s left in your bank account.
Some you can’t do much about — such as your rent or bond payment, medical aid and insurance — other than to manage your premiums and make changes where you can. Always call your insurance company every new year and ask them to reduce the payment. Alternatively, shop around for a cheaper offering.
But the smaller and midsized subscriptions, which may seem small individually, can really add up.
For example, newspapers and magazines — yes, I love, and use, the free content on the internet, but I am old school and subscribe to a number (a large number) of both online and print publications. This is in part because I like the content, but also because I want to help them survive. Each one on its own costs only about R100 to maybe R150 a month. But it’s never just one, or even two or three subscriptions. And suddenly it costs me more than R1,000 every month, and that hurts.
The problem has been choosing what I could live without. Truthfully, some are important for my work while all are important for me to stay informed.
So I signed up with the Magzter digital service. It costs about R1,000 for an annual plan, or R160 a month. I can use it on all my devices and it has almost every magazine and newspaper I want to read. This simple trick saves me more than R1,000 a month and I can keep reading. I no longer have any old-school dead-tree newspapers or magazines cluttering up the apartment.
I also manage my TV viewing. I long ago quit the expensive DStv. But by subscribing to Amazon Prime, YouTube Premium, Netflix, Showmax and recently Disney+, I was paying almost as much as I did for a DStv subscription — and I don’t even watch that much TV! So now I only ever subscribe to one at a time. Then, every few months, I switch to another streaming service. It does mean I haven’t watched The Crown yet, but it can wait until my next signup on Netflix.
For some, a monthly subscription is a pool cleaning service. Where I live it’s not my responsibility, but a friend was paying almost R1,000 a month for it. So they got the children involved in managing the pool as part of their chores. There’s another bunch of money not leaving their account every month.
These examples are all midsized, but we also need to focus on those small subscription services that may cost between R50 and maybe R100 a month. Again, each on its own is not significant, but they add up. Worse, we may use these services only occasionally.
So: scour your bank account looking for small payments and cancel those that are not being fully used. You’ll thank yourself for it later.
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