Subscriptions often start out small, at just a few dollars a month. But they add up quickly, and if you’re not vigilant, the true monthly cost can sneak up on you. In the past week alone, I was surprised to see $154 coming out of my bank account for three newspaper subscriptions. Two were subscriptions whose prices had jumped up after I had signed up under cheap introductory offers months ago.
Another one was the annual charge on a subscription that I didn’t even realize I still had. I signed up for it at least four years ago, and when a friend asked me recently if I still had it to help him access an article, I said unfortunately, no. I was wrong. I had been paying for it all along. All of these subscriptions were on auto-pay, which contributed to my appalled facial expression when I saw the charges in my account. The question of which subscriptions to cancel grows even more fraught when I think about the ones I signed up for with the intention of improving myself, like the language-learning app that was going to be my ticket to learning Spanish. What’s worse, the month is just starting and these are not my only …