Decluttering subscriptions
Today’s decluttering activity was decluttering subscriptions. The reason for this was that I’d had an email this morning telling me that an organisation had taken money from my PayPal account as an annual subscription. I’d had no reminder, or opportunity to cancel from this company. Just a message that the money was gone.
This message made me angry.
How many other people were able to do this?
As it turns out, I used my PayPal account to pay for a lot of things, and some companies had set up subscriptions that automatically took money out. In total, 13 different companies showed up on my preapproved payments page.
I get that for many companies, this is really convenient for them, and for many customers it is too. However, I stopped doing direct debits years ago, because some companies abuse the facility.Now I was faced with an online version, and I’d walked blindly into it.
When you logon to PayPal, there isn’t an easy way to find your pre-approved payments page. There isn’t a drop down link, however, if you go into My profile/ My money there is a link to pre-approved payments there.
To de-activate a pre-approved payment, you will need to go into your pre-approved payments page, and click on each one. There is then an option to cancel the payments.
In the end, I deactivated 10 pre-approved payments, leaving only three remaining. This is much more manageable.
So what about you? I would suggest taking a look at your bank account and your PayPal account to see what goes out each month. Some subscriptions are annual, and unless the company sends a reminder, then a company you may have forgotten about may take money from your account.
One unexpected bonus of all the decluttering, is that I’m much more aware of where money has gone, and where it has been wasted. Consequently, I’m determined to tackle my money demons, and to become much more frugal with my spending.
Take care for now
Karen x