I had an entirely different idea for an article until about two hours ago. My Sunday ritual is to run errands, choke down dinner at my parents’ and write my articles. As I was putting the finishing touches on my other article it dawned on me that I hadn’t cancelled a subscription.
Two years ago I signed up for a $40.00 per month online service to do research for another article I write. I was shocked when the total for two years was almost $900.00. Not that I wanted to use the service more than a month, but I could have.
The $900.00 is water under the bridge. I decided to scan my online bank statement and see what other recurring fees I was making. To my surprise I had eight concurrent and inveterate fees sucking $400.00 per month from my account. Two of those were insurance payments and one was Netflix. The others were all incidental services I signed up for and never cancelled.
Websites don’t make it easy to cancel subscriptions because they want to keep the annuity. I had to click through a questionnaire on one website in order to cancel and I’m still unsure whether it worked. Another sent me a code via text and requested I call a toll free number.
I took issue with the payments because I’m generally very frugal. Whenever I make a payment I always verify funds won’t be transferred without my permission. I never make online payments that automatically renew without warning.
It’s a good idea to check bank statements periodically to make sure you aren’t paying for services you’re not receiving. On my statements they were easy to find because of the names of services accepting payments. Your bank may list them as an Automated Clearing House (ACH) payment or as a credit/debit transaction.
Although recurring payments can show up from any company, they generally focus around technology based services. Online dating sites, software licensing fees, donations, magazine and newspaper subscriptions and just about anything else having to do with technology may be withdrawing money from your account.
Cancelling automated payments can be as simple as logging into the website or calling a toll free number. Like my debacle, you may run into some roadblocks designed to retain your business. I found the average amount of time to cancel was around five minutes each with the questionnaire taking a bit longer.
Preventing recurring payments from online subscription based companies may be difficult because this is the direction the industry is moving. Companies like Microsoft and Adobe are now renting software rather than selling a lifetime license. Businesses make more profit by forcing payments.
If you must sign up for a service that uses online payments it’s a good idea to use a third party financial service like PayPal. Rather than cut through layers of red tape in order to rescind, PayPal handles the cancellation with a couple clicks. The best part of all is their payment service is free to the customer.
It’s never fun to look at a bank statement and see payments that should have been cancelled years ago. I had to chalk up my situation as a learning experience and vowed to myself to check bank statements after I cancel a service to verify it was actually cancelled. In the end I found it slightly ironic that I paid for technology to research an article I write on human interactions without technology.
(Jeromy Patriquin is the President of Laptop & Computer Repair, Inc. located at 509 Main St. in Gardner. You can call him at (978) 919-8059 or visit www.LocalComputerWiz.com.)