Rhyme and Reflection

I logged into the app to cancel the subscription. There was few more hours before the automatic charge would kick in .. frantically I searched and could not find a easy way to cancel it. Next stop, I started chatting with the automated chat bot .. a few pleasant exchanges but it remained clueless .. next I dialed the phone number .. a stern voice at the other end announced .. we are currently closed. please call between 8:00am and 8:00pm EST .. ah!!! Desperate, I sent an email and a text to the subscription department asking to cancel and waited ….

I did not realize that my life is a tangle of subscriptions .. subscription for movies, music, gym, food, love etc etc .. In fact, I could extrapolate that my house, car, phone, utilities are all some form of recurring expenses .. albeit with different names of mortgage, loan payment but really subscription behind the scenes.

When did this life become so entangled with subscriptions? Long ago, people purchased a house and stayed for 30 odd years to pay off .. there was one phone line, one cable and most of the stuff was purchased once and lasted a lifetime .. now we continue to modify, upgrade, refinance and do other financial rigamarole to keep that payment low and forever .. we have somehow found a way to move from smart to stupidity.

My first experience started when I stepped out of college and went looking for a car. The search landed me in a dealer’s used car showroom. The wise sales person convinced me to buy an expensive car tagged with a huge interest but a small monthly payment recurring for many years. The adrenaline junked brain of mine did not understand the math and I fell for the trick. I had a loan, a nice car and felt like I was “smart” .. few years down, the car conked .. with minimal salvage value but the loan continued. It should have been a wake-up call but “ego” continued to rule the show and took me deeper into the trap.

Somewhere along the line came the iPhone .. we all fell in love and became attached to it. It became an extension of our body .. an appendage. With it, came the torrential rain of subscriptions .. Apple Music, fitness+, news+, Spotify, Netflix, blinkist, amazon prime .. and on and on .. a few dollars here, a few dollars there .. the monthly bills continued to climb secretly, in silence and in background ..

Cancellations became a new game. Some of them allowed easy cancellations while other made you jump from one pillar to another. In addition, the memory played a hide-seek in remembering all the many subscriptions. The credit cards made it even more difficult with the language that “once you provide a card, the charging can continue indefinitely”. They were all playing to the greatest human weakness - our laziness.

The anger at a bad subscription lasted when charge occurred on the card and slowly dissipated as time went by .. only to surface again the next time the charge came in. The many excuses that we prepared for our selves helped continue the subscriptions .. I can’t call today .. I don’t know the number .. I’m not waiting for two hours to call and cancel .. I forgot the secret code … and many more silly excuses ruled our day while the businesses laughed their way to the bank.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal summarized this “ .. The strategy of locking people into small, recurring payments predates the internet and even credit cards, but it gained momentum during the pandemic. It doesn’t just add up to a lot of money for many household budgets—it has created hundreds of billions of dollars of value on Wall Street. ..”

On a recent day, I finally pulled in an excel spreadsheet to summarize the subscription and was surprised that I spent $200 monthly .. I did not realize this all this time. I thought maybe it should be $30 to $40 per month. How incorrect was I ?

After these years, I’m finally ready to rein in this nuisance .. but wait, the “excel” app that helps me track my finances just dinged me with a subscription. I’m trapped ..