Subs - annual or monthly?
Do you go for cheap yearly subscriptions or cancelable monthly ones to save money? In these tough times, I'm going with the latter. Here's why.
You know how it goes. You find a service that could be useful for whatever you do, and inevitably these days, it's a subscription service. They offer you a discount for signing up for a year upfront, or a monthly fee that's maybe 33% more expensive that if you divided that annual fee over 12 months.
So, what do you do?
Is this a dilemma you find yourself in?
Until now, I've been an annual subs kind of person. But I find myself paying out quite a lot of money if I have too many of these now. And services are changing so fast, especially if they are AI-based at all, that it seems crazy to sign up for 12 months.
I mean, something better really could come along tomorrow.
I think my annual subs bias came from the fear of missing out on a deal. But now, I fear overpaying for a service that could be superceded before I get the value out of the year-long subscription. But even that is based on fear of missing out.
Fuck, that's a lot of anxiety going on in my head.
Modern capitalism, eh?
So, I'm changing my default on this, with my cash balance being a determiner.
Because, if I'm honest, I don't know if I even have the time to get the most out of the annual subscriptions I sign up for.
So here's what I'm going to do instead:
Sign up for fewer monthly subscriptions (compared to the annual subscriptions I seem to rack up) and review them quarterly.
And that means tracking what I sign up for, too.
Sounds simple, but I actually have to do it now.
What's your approach to solving this modern life puzzle? Let us know down in the comments.