You know what I say about subscriptions.
Well, I have zero subscriptions. They're just a way to continually fleece people and make them lose all track of the money they're spending.
Each one takes a smallish amount, but especially with streaming apps, the networks and lawyers got together to make sure that this gets away from you fast and ends up being worse than premium cable TV ever was, and you don't own a copy of any of it so if you stop paying you lose it, but you also lose it whenever they decide to take it down, which is always going on. Or if they ever decide to shut down the streaming disservice entirely, which happens.
I've been yelling about some variation on this problem since it was iTunes and Walmart Music and such. They would "sell you music files" and they had DRM in the files, which I call Digital Restrictions Malware. It limited what devices it worked with so you couldn't necessarily even listen to your own music, which you paid for, and eventually Walmart Music got rid of their server and they said the files would stop working as soon as the PC that was authorized to use them broke down. They didn't refund anyone's money. They just took it and kept it. When someone explained to me how iTunes worked, I said "This is terrible. Why would anyone agree to it? This is worse than a folder of MP3s."
Companies have been trying to get people to not only pay for this garbage, but actually like it and recommend that others make the same mistake, for ever 20 years now. It gets more expensive all the time, it's pointless, and DRM and streaming apps should die in a fire.
If you have $300 worth of this each month, just cancel it. At the end of every year, take $3600 out of your pocket, and put it in a burn barrel and light it on fire and you'll be just as well off.
In many cases, the anti-customer abuses of DRM continue unabated in streaming apps. If you want to watch Amazon Prime video and your TV has HDMI, but not the right version of HDCP, it will refuse to play on your TV and give you an error that says you need to go out and replace a working TV set with another TV set so that their software that takes away your rights (which you would otherwise have under the 1978 Copyright Act and the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act and various other laws) can operate. Then your old TV goes where exactly? If you plan to use these apps with it, it doesn't work anymore, despite working perfectly fine.
The only thing these stupid apps do is always be costing you money somehow.
In the news recently, a man took his wife to Disney World. They were eating at a restaurant. They informed the staff she had nut and dairy allergies which would kill her if she consumed either. They brought her food that killed her. When the husband tried to sue Disney for wrongful death, they came back and said that since he had a free trial of Disney Plus five years ago, he agreed that he could never sue them for anything. They also said that even if he didn't have the Disney Plus free trial five years ago, that they buried the same agreement in the app he used to buy his park tickets with.
Anything that's taking money away from you on a recurring basis that doesn't fall under these categories should be re-evaluated to see if they are even necessary at all:
Rent/Mortgage
Groceries
Utilities
Sufficient Transportation
Home/Auto Insurance
Necessary and Proper Medical Care
And you should always look into these and see if you can do any better than you are now.
I don't even know how you spend hundreds of dollars a month on streaming (some people do). How many streaming apps can you watch at the same time and how fast can you make it through the shows? Probably not fast if you're usually working, even with only one app.
Why not just borrow entire seasons from the library? You already pay for that. It's called property tax. They siphon off $479 a year from us whether I even go in the library or not.
My ex and the NIGHTLY $60 Chipotle run.
My ex who is terribly in debt (part of that would be my fault as he knocked me over, forced me into bankruptcy several years ago, and I decided to ditch my car and not even try to save it because he co-signed on it and why keep struggling with something that would also set him back if I just let it go...) told me the other day that he and his boyfriend spent $57 at Chipotle one evening.
That's....some expensive burritos. They say neither one of them knows how to cook and that's why they blow through three times my grocery bill eating out.
I usually use the Instant Pots or air fryers. I'd consider myself fairly lazy and even I cook. I cook because adding $1,200 a month to our food budget by not cooking is not a problem I want to pay someone $1200 more each month to solve.
It must be nice to be a typical person and only worry about how you'll get to the end of a single day.
Part of what helps me be lazy is not having debt. When I'm not running off trying to figure out how to pay thousands in bank interest because I am like the typical American who doesn't handle money right and thinks that a credit score company teaches people life skills (it doesn't), I don't need to do what people with money tell me to, only to turn around and hand it to the bank.
There is no such thing as good debt. It's an illusion.
Interest-bearing debt is automatically insidious debt. Banks don't write you loans because they like you and want to fund your dreams and ambitions. They write you loans because almost everything a typical person finances is some sort of vanity or ego thing, or a midlife crisis, or some other kind of mistake. They then insist that it's good debt while the bank laughs at all this "free money" that rolls in (that would be the interest payments) that these people worked long and hard for, and got no value from.
Bank loans don't provide value, they provide menacing threats.
Until the last payment goes in, the loan is a constant source of stress, overwork, and danger.
The threats begin the minute the payment is late. They start by tapping you on the shoulder and saying "Excuse us, we believe you overlooked this. We're here to help you get back on track." then after a while it turns to "WE WANT OUR MONEY NOW!!!" and the phone ringing off the proverbial hook, and threats, and letters from collection agencies and law firms, and then a summons to court where they will take it from you by force through wage garnishment even if that leaves you with almost no money to live on.
Meanwhile, they ruin your credit to spite you knowing it will make it more difficult to even rent an apartment or insure your car, which you have to do or you'll get charged with a crime if you get pulled over.
For most people, credit scores are not a good thing, they represent some form of perpetual difficulty.
Either because they'll be punished for not handing their money over on time, often for things they can't even live without, like adequete medical care, or if they have a "good score", it means they took on all kinds of loans and work and work for the bank.
In almost everything you do, there's a way to do it better that will move you to the correct side of the ledger.
It's not always something big, like rent. I can't control the rental market. But I can control the shaving razors I use. For a long time, I was caught up in Gillette's system. I didn't even think about how much it cost me other than I saved a bit in the mega packs.
Then it occurred to me one day when I was in a store picking up prescriptions that they locked the Gillette razor cartridges behind glass. One pack of them was almost $90.
For many years, a sustained marketing campaign has taken us from cheap safety razors with blades that cost a few pennies, to shaving cartridges that are about $5-6 each. People have been systematically trained to do things that are stupid and costly, and told that it makes them smart. It's not just shaving razors. You can put a marketing campaign behind almost anything. Only a few people ever realize how much of their budget is wasted.
Letting credit reporting companies talk to children is as-if someone let the cigarette company representatives into public health class.
In the Bankruptcy Reform, Congress mandated some "debtor education". Most people don't learn anything, but if people learned Home Economics, fewer people would get a crash course in bankruptcy. 16% of all people filing bankruptcy are people who already did it once and didn't learn anything. Instead of saying "That was horrible!" they treat it as a second, or third trip through the haunted house.
