When the Covid pandemic lockdowns forced us to stay home for months and months, one of the companies to benefit the most were food deliveries such as Ubereats and SkipTheDishes. They made it so convenient to order food and relieve you from all the hassle of having to go out for grocery shopping and making the food yourself, that many people stopped cooking altogether.
Capitalizing on this trend, Ubereats and other companies in this niche came up with their own monthly subscription offering, where for flat monthly fee, you get discounts on food orders, amongst many other perks. Many bought into this, adding it to their virtual shelf of monthly subscriptions, including such popular services as Netflix, Spotify, Youtube Premium, Amazon Prime, PlayStation pass and others.
This all comes at a big cost to your debt: scan your monthly credit card statements for the last 12 months and add up what all these monthly subscriptions are costing you: don’t be surprised or shocked to find that they are costing you thousands annually, and just a few hundreds. It is that whole ‘boiling frog syndrome‘ , where things may not be big enough to be noticed at once, until things are too late and realize that you have lost thousands on their services combined.
Making some tough choices to break the addiction
Start by listing all your monthly (or in some cases annual) subscriptions or plans, sorting them from highest cost to lowest. Next, look for identical ones and decide whether you need both. For example, if you are paying for storage from both Apple (with an iPhone) and Google, then decide if you really need both? Next, decide how much of your budget do you need to allocate to monthly subscriptions: say you only want to spend maximum of $50 a month: then you need to figure out which 2 or 3 services that you absolutely need, will add up to total of $50 a month or less?
Sure, monthly subscription services are meant to make our life easier, entertain us, and give us convenient access to things we enjoy — but if left unchecked, they can quietly drain our bank accounts and derail our budget. We need to be mindful and intentional about which services we are paying money for and that they are well worth the money.