I Listed Every Recurring Charge on One Page. It Came to £2,904 a Year.

I went through twenty-four months of bank and card statements and wrote down every charge that repeated. There were thirty-one of them. Converted to annual figures and totalled, they came to £2,904, which was more than I spend on food and about a fifth of what I had assumed my discretionary spending was in total.

The number is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that I could not have told you it was anywhere near that, and I am someone who tracks his spending. The reason is structural, and it is the whole subject of this piece: subscriptions are the only significant category of spending that is designed never to be reviewed.

Consider how differently the same money is presented. A £240 purchase is an event. You think about it, possibly for days, and you remember it. A £20 monthly subscription is £240 a year, arrives as twelve small lines scattered across statements, is never presented as a total, and after the first month is never presented as a decision at all. Same money, and one of them gets scrutiny and the other structurally cannot.

The three worst offenders in my list, by the gap between what I thought and what it was: a cloud storage plan I had upgraded “temporarily” in 2022 and never downgraded, £143 a year; a music service family plan that had two members who had moved out, £108 a year of the £144; and a domain registrar’s privacy add-on that had renewed at £29 after a first year at £6, which I had genuinely never noticed because the renewal email says “your domain has renewed” and not what it cost.

The thing all three have in common is that they changed after I decided. The upgrade, the household, the price. My original decision was correct at the time in all three cases, and none of them was wrong through carelessness — they were wrong through the passage of time, and there was no mechanism anywhere that would ever ask me to look again.

So the fix I have implemented is not about cancelling things. It is about creating that mechanism. Every recurring charge now has a calendar event thirty days before its renewal, titled with the annual cost. Not the monthly one — the annual one, because £240 prompts a different question than £20. Setting these up took about an hour for thirty-one items and I have done it once.

In the eleven months since, those prompts have led to seven cancellations and four downgrades, totalling £871 a year. What I want to emphasise is that I had already done the big audit, and had already cancelled the obvious things, before setting up the prompts. The £871 is what the prompts caught afterwards — things that became wrong during the year rather than things that were wrong when I looked.

One practical note that made a real difference: I put the annual figure in the event title rather than the body, because I see titles and I do not open events. It sounds trivial. It is the difference between the prompt working and the prompt being another notification I dismiss.

I am not going to argue that any of these subscriptions were bad. Several I renewed happily. The argument is only that a category of spending which totals nearly three thousand pounds a year deserves at least one deliberate look per item per year, and by default it receives none.