How to find every subscription you are still paying for

The subscriptions costing you the most are not the ones you think about. They are the ones you forgot, which is precisely why they are still running.

Finding them takes about half an hour and needs one thing most people skip: a full twelve months of statements, not three. Annual subscriptions are the expensive ones and they are invisible in a quarterly view.

The sweep

6 things to do

Download twelve months of statements for every current account and credit card.
Sort by merchant rather than by date, so repeats group together.
Mark anything that appears more than twice at a similar amount.
Separately scan for single larger charges around the same date each year, which is where annual renewals hide.
Check app store subscriptions on every phone in the household, since these do not always appear as recognisable names.
Search your email for renewal, receipt, subscription and your card's last four digits.

Ticks are for this visit only. Nothing here is saved anywhere.

Where forgotten subscriptions usually hide

Annual renewals
Why it gets missed
Appears once a year, never in a three month view
App store billing
Why it gets missed
Shows as the store, not the service
Free trials that converted
Why it gets missed
The first charge arrives long after you signed up
Old cards still on file
Why it gets missed
Charges continue on a card you replaced
Services bundled with something else
Why it gets missed
One line covers several products
A partner's account
Why it gets missed
Two people each paying for the same thing

Where	Why it gets missed
Annual renewals	Appears once a year, never in a three month view
App store billing	Shows as the store, not the service
Free trials that converted	The first charge arrives long after you signed up
Old cards still on file	Charges continue on a card you replaced
Services bundled with something else	One line covers several products
A partner's account	Two people each paying for the same thing

Decide with the annual figure, not the monthly one

Nine ninety nine a month is easy to keep. A hundred and twenty pounds a year is a decision. Same money, different question, and the annual figure is the one that tells you the truth about whether you want it.

Multiply everything by twelve before you decide anything, and look at the total across all of them. That number is usually a surprise.

Cancelling is the easy part. Noticing is not

Nothing about this is difficult once you have found them. The reason people pay for years is not that cancelling is hard, it is that nothing ever brings the charge to their attention at a moment when they are thinking about it.

Which is why doing this once is worth much less than having somewhere the list actually lives afterwards.