You should get a decent idea of the things you’ve signed up for, but may have to wade through lots of promotional emails before you find the services you actually subscribed to. Using the advanced search function in your email, enter the words “welcome” or “thank you” in the subject field, and variations on the words “annual” “subscribing” and “membership” in the general or keyword search fields. It may be a lot to scroll through, but each monthly subscription will appear at least once in that time frame.Īnother approach is to search for welcome and thank you emails, since most services send out an initial message confirming your new subscription. One of the most comprehensive ways to see what you’re paying for is to look at your bank and credit card transactions, performing a search for every transaction in the previous full month. You, too, may not know what subscriptions are quietly subtracting dollars from your accounts. Surprises included a coding game for my kid (that he no longer plays) and a British streaming app I’d gotten for one show (that I finished nearly a year ago). First things first: Find out what subscriptions you haveīefore putting this post together, I had no idea how many subscriptions I was paying for. And for those who could use a little cancellation help, we tested a couple of finance apps that track and nix stuff on your behalf. We included a list of common subscriptions you may have forgotten about, as well as instructions on how to cancel a few of the most unwanted.

While it’s tough to keep track of everything you signed up for – especially the ones you don’t use – we’ve come up with a few tricks to help thin the ranks of your recurring charges.

But subscription overload is real, with dozens of streaming, gaming, dating and even hot-sauce delivery services lining up to take a monthly cut of your paycheck. Paying a monthly fee for something you never use makes zero financial sense.

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