There's a good chance that you spend more — way more — than you think you spend on subscriptions. In a subscription-heavy economy that willingly extracts monthly fees for premium content, razors, air fresheners, food deliveries, and dog toys, it's pretty easy to do. According to CNBC, around a third of consumers spend $100 to $199 more than they think they do on subscriptions, and more than 40 percent of consumers are still paying for forgotten subscriptions that they never use.
If you want to trim all the fat for good, you'll need to take the time to go through your emails and credit card statements to identify all the things you're paying for that you don't actually want. But there may be an upside: When you decide which companies to contact to cancel subscriptions, you can also ask for refunds.
For companies that deal in digital-only products and services, you might be pleasantly surprised at how easily you can claw back at least some of that wasted cash. Writing for the Guardian, Chloe Hamilton asked Amazon to refund several months of unused credit when she canceled a forgotten Audible subscription. To her surprise, the customer service representative immediately agreed, and the money reappeared in her bank account within a few days.
After finding out that she'd been subscribing to Babel for a full year without realizing it, another consumer requested a refund and to her amazement, promptly received it.
If you're going to the trouble of figuring out all your subscriptions and canceling them, you might as well take a few extra minutes to ask for your money back. The worst they can say, after all, is no.
