Intro: Welcome to A Pleasant Solution, Embracing An Organized Life. I'm your host, certified life coach, professional organizer, and home life expert, Amelia Pleasant Kennedy and I help folks permanently eliminate clutter in their homes and lives. On this podcast will go beyond the basics of home organization to talk about why a clutter-free mindset is essential to an aligned and sustainable lifestyle. If you're someone with a to-do list, if you're managing a household and if you're caring for others, this podcast is for you. Let's dive in.
Amelia: Welcome to Episode 79, “Subscriptions and Memberships.” Hey y’all! When I was young, I loved getting magazines. When a new issue arrived each month, it felt like a special moment. The first subscription I received was Highlights. (And just as an aside, I submitted a poem to Highlights that was published – proud moment. Then, last weekend my daughter and I were walking through the Columbus Book Festival and saw a Highlights table. I smiled to know the publication was still going strong.) Eventually I received Cricket, a short story publication. In my teen years, I asked for subscriptions to DANCE Magazine, Honey, and a few other pop magazines. My mother was a decades-long subscriber to Vogue. I liked the glossiness of the pages, the photography, the writing, and the layout.
Subscriptions used to be straightforward. Each year you had to opt-in to continue access to the magazine, frozen food service, or beauty supply company. You’d write a check and wait for the renewal notice the following month or year. Recently, I decided to sit down and review the number of subscriptions and memberships that exist in our households. As we were moving yet again, I wanted to make sure we turned off the old, activated the new, and had the correct address and billing information set up for our core bills like electricity and cable. Then, because I’m the financial manager in our household, I went a step further and combed through our budget to make sure I had a record of everything that was on autopay.
Y’all. I don’t know about you, but the number of active subscriptions and memberships that one household can have these days is enough to swallow you in a sea of overwhelm. I imagine most folks have reached a point where they turn a blind eye and simply hope for the best. As I was going through both my monthly budget spreadsheet and the corresponding checking and credit accounts, the level of attention to detail needed (and in turn, executive functioning needed), I knew the topic warranted a podcast.
So, in today’s episode I’m going to share with you how I grabbed a hold of and keep track of the various subscriptions and memberships in our household. And note that I’ll be using these words interchangeably. My approach isn’t innovative. It’s quite straightforward, yet I do believe it requires patience and time with the reward being clarity and control over your spending. Again, many of you may have given up keeping track. As I was working through the puzzle of our household, my husband walked in, chuckled, and said, “You’ll never win the app game. I’m not sure why you’re even trying.” And that’s at the core of this whole topic. The market has decided that the best way to make money is to take advantage of your disinterest in attention to detail, keeping track, and the human belief that $5 to $15 a month is “affordable” and not worth attention.
And I know that… you’re more organized than you think. You’re in charge of your life, your home, and your budget. So, first off, I want to make a parallel between the number of objects in your home and the number of subscriptions you may have. There’s no “right” number of objects to have in your home. You decide what feels comfortable, manageable, and what number of items bring you satisfaction. It’s how you think about them – and decide whether they’re wanted and needed versus clutter – that matters. The moment your intuition or brain starts to nudge you and say that you may have an overabundance, that’s a signal I encourage you to listen to. It’s that signal that lets you know that there may be clutter that needs to be discarded or donated.
Think of your subscriptions and memberships in a similar fashion. There’s no “right” number to have, because just like we all have different sized homes, we all have different sized budgets. You decide what feels comfortable, manageable, and what number of subscriptions bring you satisfaction. It’s how you think about them – and again, actively decide whether they’re wanted and needed versus clutter – that matters. Just like the objects in your home, the moment you get a sense that you may have an overabundance (or may be turning a blind eye) to your memberships, that’s a signal you’ll want to investigate.
Another parallel to consider is, just like it’s easier to bring objects into your home than to declutter and let them go, it’s easier to sign up for new subscriptions, apps, and memberships than to consciously go into and cancel them. That’s what companies are betting on. They know you’ll let that $5 or $25 charge pass for another month because instead of an annual or monthly opt-in (like the magazine subscriptions 30 years ago), you opt-in once and that’s it. They know you’ll put the cancellation on your to-do list yet again, or better yet, forget about doing it. It’s never quite that big of a deal until you look at your statement and wonder where all the dollars have gone. My approach is to itemize, keep track of, and revisit our subscriptions on a quarterly or semi-annual basis. Just like decluttering the closet or swapping out your seasonal wardrobe, I’d offer that reviewing your subscriptions on a regular schedule will keep financial clutter at bay.
Before you begin, you have to know what you’re looking for. I define a subscription as something you pay for on a regular frequency that auto-renews each month until you cancel it. Consider your lifestyle and think of the categories you engage with most often. When it comes to food, for example, you may have memberships to big box stores like Costco, Sams, Target, or Walmart. You may have subscriptions to food delivery services like DoorDash, Grubhub, Instacart, HelloFresh. You may have separate monthly services for your pet. Then, there’s entertainment. You can break that down into subscriptions you may read like online newspapers, magazines, or Substacks. Then there are ones you may listen to like Spotify, SoundCloud, private podcasts, or Apple Music. Then there are ones you watch like Amazon, Hulu, AppleTV, Paramount+, or Netflix. The list goes on.
Let me pause and say, if you’re someone who’s a little hesitant to dive into this type of decluttering and organizing project due to thinking that there's just too many memberships to keep track of, that in and of itself is a great thing to be aware of. It’s a signal. Know that you can choose to do this pre-work of noticing where you spend before diving into the tips in the episode. Doing the pre-work of noticing is valuable insight on its own and will give you a level of internal feedback on its own.
So, my first recommendation – after you know the types of services you’re looking for – is to identify where information about them can be found. Two great places to look are on your phone and in your bank statement. Don’t skip this step, as you may discover a few memberships that have slipped under the radar by combing through the sources involved.
Honestly, this is the most tedious step. I started by asking each of my family members to bring me their phones. We use Apple devices and are bundled together under one “Family.” When a family member subscribes to something using their Apple ID, I get a notification and receipt as the “Organizer” of the family. Under “Settings > Family” you can see your family’s shared subscriptions. You can note on a spreadsheet or piece of paper what they’ve subscribed to, the frequency of the renewal, the price, and whether it’s an annual or monthly membership. I like to note which day the membership renews each year too.
Then, I opened up my checking account and combed through the debits for the past two months. In our household, I’m a Peloton user. My husband likes to get his car washed. We all use Amazon, Netflix, and Target. One daughter likes to watch anime on Crunchyroll. The list goes on. Your bank statement will give you lots of clues into your automatic spending habits. Although these habits are on autopilot, they do need tending to every so often, otherwise the clutter will start to stack up. I repeated this process by combing through our credit card statement as well. You may have partial pay, or pay-over-time, subscriptions through Klarna or AfterPay. My mother had quite a number of those through QVC awhile back. You may want to check your Venmo, PayPal, Google or ApplePay statements as well. Subscriptions and memberships can be lurking anywhere.
If you’ve made it this far, stop and celebrate yourself. Just like getting on the treadmill is the hardest part of working out, looking at your bank statements and the back end of your phone is the hardest part. Becoming aware – actually taking a look – is the hardest part of this process, so please give yourself credit.
Second, you’ll want to add them all into a spreadsheet or your favorite notes platform. If you use a banking software that categorizes your subscriptions for you, you may be able to skip this step. Our household budget isn’t fancy. It’s a spreadsheet, broken down by month, that has the following columns: name of expense, date due, amount, source of payment, date paid. That’s it. I list the fixed monthly expenses on repeat, then have a separate section just below for expenses that fall in that month on an annual basis. Once I’d identified the subscriptions we were paying for, I cross checked my budget to see if they were listed. If not, I added them. If so, I double-checked to see if the amount of the expense had increased, etc.
If you’re someone who’s building your budget from scratch, keep it simple. You know what’s coming into your bank account each month. Give yourself permission to know what’s going out. They’re numbers. They don’t have feelings. You may have feelings about what you discover, and these feelings are valid. Talk about them with a neutral party, like a therapist, a coach, or a financial professional. You’re in charge. If you discover that the numbers aren’t where you’d like them to be, ask yourself, “Now what?”
I keep track of our memberships via this monthly budget, and I have a list on my household Trello board as well. This third step is optional. It makes sense to my brain which is why I’m sharing it, but it may seem like overkill to your brain. So, in our budget, I’m acknowledging that we’re paying for them and how we’re paying for them. On my Trello board, I’m listing them out all in one place and categorizing them as monthly or annual. It’s a way for me to know in one glance all that we’ve committed to paying. It’s my way of continuing to “opt-in” and giving myself the power to “opt-out.” It’s a checklist. I can scan it, and I can see what’s ahead without the other data of our heat, our car payment, our rent, etc. on the budget spreadsheet.
Embracing an organized life is about recognizing and claiming your power with intention. It’s knowing what’s in every aspect of your life and regularly revisiting whether it’s serving you at this moment. Clutter in your budget impacts other areas of your lifestyle and unfortunately can be a sneaky energy suck. By listing out the variety of places your money is going on a monthly or annual basis, you regain control. You can then decide what to do next.
For me, that looks like ensuring that all the subscriptions are debited from my checking account. This is the fourth step. It’s also optional. I want to pay in full for these types of expenses each month knowing that they’ll repeat the following month. I actively went through my credit card statement to identify any memberships that were being charged to my credit card and shifted them to our debit card. I encourage you to consider what makes the most sense for you. Ask yourself, “Knowing that this charge will continue to repeat until I stop it, how do I want to pay for it?” Again, it’s the awareness and intention that matters.
It's not until this fifth and final step that you’ll actually decide to declutter your subscriptions and memberships. Knowing your current charges and spending habits and classifying them builds your awareness and it builds your organizational skills. Of course you can declutter along the way of collecting the data, yet that keeps you from seeing the enormity of it all. A big part of it for me was seeing how many $5 - $25 or $100 annual subscriptions we were paying for. The impact of our individual, then collective choices as a household matter.
So, I invited everyone in my family back for a quick chat. Of course, I could’ve blanketly decided that we’d stop paying for this various video game or app. Yet, for me the lesson, the learning, the teachable moment happens through conversation. I asked them, “How often do you log into to this video game / app, etc.?” Encourage them to be specific. “Have you used it in the last week or month? How many times?” You’ll learn about their interests, and how they may have changed. You’ll learn whether they’ve been consuming the content actively or passively. This is the information that best supports your collective decision to keep paying for it or not. For example, I discovered we get MAX for free through multiple different cable services as an “add-on.” Great. Then why were we paying for it through our cable platform? That detail was about $200. Now, multiply that across all of the various memberships you may have. Doing this detailed work will make a difference.
To my husband’s credit, you and I may not “win the app game.” But I don’t want to be a sucker either. There are lots of great, valuable, entertaining, helpful services out there. I want to subscribe. I want convenience. I want to keep opting-in month over month, just like my magazine subscriptions. These memberships aren’t clutter. However, I guarantee you’ll find a few that are. The beauty of this lengthy, somewhat tedious process is that once you establish a budget spreadsheet or a list of your various subscriptions, the primary work is done. From this day forward you’ll only have to add or subtract. You can set up a notification to remind you to review the tremendous work you’ve done. It’s another way to deepen your decision making and build your self-trust, one project at a time. Talk to y’all soon.
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