How to Save On Your Bills: Subscriptions

I remember it wasn't that long ago that subscription services were for things like magazines and getting CDs sent to you in the mail via that 99 cent deal that Columbia House used to offer.

Over the last decade, Americans have been bombarded with subscription services for every conceivable product and concept.

If you want clothes shipped to you, you can get them via a few different services. Food...same thing. You can even get subscription dog food, dog toys and fishing lures.

But the big question, if you're reviewing your budget, is: Do I really need that? When you're looking over things like shelter, food, clothes and other basic necessities, you often times won't find much fat to cut.

This area though is one of the easiest ways to save big money while not really affecting your daily lives.

Here are a few ways you can save on subscription fees:

1. Review it for necessity:

Sure, you need clothes. Yes, you need food as well. But do you really need that Stitch Fix subscription and that Panera Bread coffee subscription?

For most things, the answer is a resounding no.

They might make some things a bit easier. I can't argue that. But, when you're trying to balance your personal budget, you might need to do some things the old fashioned way.

Go to TJ Maxx and buy your clothes. Brew a pot of coffee in the morning and take it along with you. Get Scruffy and buy him the cream of the crop dog food at Petco.

In an earlier story, I showed how to save money on cable and internet. If you're going to be a cord cutter, that's great, but if you just replace that cable cost with Hulu, Netflix, HBO Max and Disney+ you might not be saving any money at all.

2. Review it for usage:

So your review passed test number one and you've deemed it necessary. The next step is to review usage.

Amazon Prime is a fantastic deal. At $15 per month, you get free shipping on a significant number of items from Amazon, plus you get to utilize the Prime Reading and Prime Video platforms for free as a part of that cost.

When you look back over your costs, that comes in at $180 per year. Do you get $180 in value from that subscription? If you're watching Amazon Prime Video every day, and receiving multiple packages per month, you probably get your money's worth. If not, re-evaluate whether you can save a few bucks by dropping the service.

3. Freemium

Check into your subscriptions and see if there are free options for the premium services.

There are many options on subscriptions for a freemium option. Netflix, Hulu and others provide a great service for watching television shows and movies. Hulu used to be a freemium option. If you recall, you used to be able to watch unlimited Hulu TV shows and movies, but you would have to sit through an advertisement interspersed through the video.

Have you heard of The Roku Channel or PlutoTV? PlutoTV is a CBSViacom product that is available on the internet, cell phones, tablets and on over-the-top devices.

It's a free service with hundreds of channels dedicated to a variety of different topics. Classic TV, News and Opinion, Music and local live TV are available for free on PlutoTV. You just have to watch advertising, just like in the old days of cable/satellite television.

A few other ideas are for the creative out there that utilize Adobe Creative Cloud. That costs between $30-50 per month to use Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator and the like. There are open source free software options that can accomplish the same things.

4. Review your checking account statement

Balancing your checkbook used to be a thing. Some people still do it, despite not really writing many checks.

Now, you get an electronic bank statement that shows all transactions for the month. As handy as that might be, you might want to do a deep review of that every so often.

Remember that time when you signed up for Netflix for a free month or that time when you got a free box from ButcherBox? It's possible that you never cancelled that service you signed up for and you've been getting billed.

I used to work in customer support for a company that did recurring billing for services. The number of people who signed up for recurring billing and never cancelled it was astounding.

Ten dollars per month isn't a lot of money, but if you do it for three or four things, that starts to add up quickly.

It's also not a bad idea to review your statement anyway just to see exactly where your money is going.

Come back next week to learn more about cost savings from our series or visit timleister.com to learn more about how you can make your money work for you and begin living the life you dreamed of.