[HN Gopher] Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget...
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Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel
Author : hhs
Score : 204 points
Date : 2024-01-19 17:15 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| neogodless wrote:
| https://archive.is/Kh4Zy
| marcrosoft wrote:
| Use virtual credit cards and privacy.com. It really helps with
| peace of mind that you can really have a free trial and not worry
| about it.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I was about to post this. The usual HNers with nothing better
| to do will warn about how you're still liable, they can come
| after you, yada yada yada.
|
| Ignore them. Just give a virtual credit card to any
| subscription service, and set a credit limit on it. Problem
| solved. If they try to keep charging your card: too bad, the
| charges are declined.
| rwbt wrote:
| How does one get virtual credit cards? I remember some banks
| like Discover offered them, but I don't see them anymore.
| criddell wrote:
| Apple Card does this:
| https://www.idownloadblog.com/2019/04/01/apple-card-
| virtual-...
|
| It's not unique to Apple though. I think it's this standard
| from EMVCo
|
| https://www.emvco.com/emv-technologies/payment-tokenisation/
| guntars wrote:
| Apple lets you replace your card number with a new one, but
| it's not quite the same as creating single-use virtual
| numbers for sketchy businesses.
| criddell wrote:
| The EMVCo link is actually more interesting. The payment
| tokenization scheme means that the merchant never gets
| your card number (the PAN), they get a token.
|
| > EMV Payment Tokenisation enhances transaction security
| by removing the most valuable data to a fraudster within
| a transaction, the primary account number (PAN), and
| replacing it with a unique alternative value, a payment
| token.
|
| > This reduces the value of payments information stolen
| in the event of a data compromise, as a payment token
| should not be able to be used beyond the environment in
| which it was intended. Payment tokens support both face-
| to-face (F2F) and remote payment transactions.
|
| Basically, if Amazon leaks my credit card data, thieves
| can't use it because the number is associated with my
| Amazon account only. That one token can be cancelled and
| the next time I buy something a new one is issued and I
| don't have to replace my credit card just because one
| merchant leaked my info.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| with capital one they have a browser extension called Eno
| that remembers which card is for which domain and autofills
| it.
| _rs wrote:
| Citi still offers it
| dustincoates wrote:
| Wise offers them: https://wise.com/gb/virtual-card/
| grotorea wrote:
| Potentially stupid question: if you cancel the virtual credit
| card, can't the company then send your debt to collections
| resulting in a bigger headache?
| paulpauper wrote:
| no, this is bad advice . Credit cards are better because the
| dispute process is more favorable to buyers and longer dispute
| window. A debit card has worse buyer protection.
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| Recent story: I had Duolingo, for some reason I've forgotten.
| They sent me a "we are about to renew" message.
|
| So I went there and cancelled my account, and they even sent me
| a "sorry to see you go" message. They definitely got it.
|
| Then they went and charged my card anyway. But it was declined,
| because I'd closed the privacy.com virtual card I'd given them.
|
| That's why you do this.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Forget to? Or involve so many dark patterns it's nearly
| impossible to?
| ksd482 wrote:
| I think it's both.
|
| To counter the dark patterns, I now use privacy.com. It's far
| easier to just cancel a virtual credit card.
| bonton89 wrote:
| Is it true you can use a fake name (and presumably address I
| guess) for privacy.com credit cards?
|
| I have virtual cards through capital one but they seem much
| less feature rich.
| nunez wrote:
| Yup. you can use any name and address you want. Excellent
| for increasing online shopping security. (Parent company of
| the three companies you bought stuff from got big hacked?
| Who cares; all they're getting from you is fake data.)
| blueridge wrote:
| I don't understand, do people not log in online to look at their
| credit card statements? It takes 5 minutes to skim your
| transactions, look for suspicious charges, get a quick read on
| where money is going.
|
| There are lots of challenges to actually _canceling_
| subscriptions, but not knowing that you 're being charged for
| something every month? Seems absent-minded to me.
| bowsamic wrote:
| No, they don't.
| supportengineer wrote:
| I check all my accounts every day.
| gumby wrote:
| I put all my subscriptions on a single credit card (and use it
| for nothing else) so that it's easy to scan. Otherwise they'd
| be buried.
| ksd482 wrote:
| Yes, exactly. I am myself guilty of exactly that. My excuse (a
| really lame one): logging in to my credit card accounts is too
| much of a friction with 2FA and all that, and then sifting
| through statements is work. I don't want to do the work.
|
| Of course, that's a pathetic excuse, and I tell myself that one
| of these days I will check my statements but that day never
| comes.
|
| It's quite easy to be lazy in the moment and put this "work"
| off to tomorrow. As a result, days, weeks and months go by.
|
| I now use privacy.com for most subscriptions and one-off trials
| etc. It at least notifies me via email every time there is a
| transaction.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Absolutely not.
|
| It was easy to look at statements when they arrived by mail.
|
| But with paperless billing, you've got to conscientiously log
| into your credit card site each month. If you have four cards,
| that's four logins. Who's going to do that? Not many.
|
| The only reason I review my transactions it's because it's easy
| through an aggregator like Monarch (was using Mint before it
| shut down). And the only reason I do that is for _budgeting_ --
| reviewing transactions is just a side effect.
|
| It still annoys me to no end that I don't have a single bank or
| credit card that will attach my statement as a PDF to a monthly
| email. As long as there's a secure email transmission
| connection, I don't understand why they won't do that.
| xerxesaa wrote:
| My strategy here is disable all auto pays and make it a
| manual ritual to pay my bills at the start of each calendar
| month.
|
| Doing it once a month is easy enough to remember (or put a
| calendar invite, if you're not able to) and forces me to do a
| quick validation. In my 20 years of working and being
| independent, I've never accidentally paid for a subscription
| longer than one month.
| sneak wrote:
| Things I don't have on autopay frequently get shut off when
| I forget (or delay) paying for them.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not around or just forget to pay something. For
| its potential downsides, the fact that I basically don't
| have to think about a bunch of my ongoing billing
| (including essential stuff like electricity) is an
| admittedly first world but nonetheless big improvement
| over weekly write checks/mail envelopes ritual as I did
| for years. (Certainly there are incremental levels but I
| carefully evaluate new subscriptions and don't really
| have an issue with automatic billing.)
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yup, I've learned that lesson as well.
|
| You go on vacation and bill pay day was in the middle of
| it. Or you're just busy and forget to move the calendar
| reminder to tomorrow. Or you get through half of them and
| get interrupted and forget you didn't finish.
|
| I trust autopay far more than I trust myself!
| bonton89 wrote:
| I sort of have a compromise solution for this. I use my
| banks autopay whenever possible which is a push instead
| of a pull. That way I can just shut it off instead of
| finding some weird website I haven't used in a million
| years or call and wait on hold for 20 minutes. I started
| using it mostly so I didn't have to buy checks but I saw
| it had some advantages beyond that.
|
| It doesn't work well with variable bills though because I
| can't schedule an amount I don't know yet to be paid. I'm
| stuck using a pull for my power bill for instance.
| josefresco wrote:
| > Mint before it shut down
|
| This was the best, and only feature I used on Mint. Quick
| glance a couple times a month was an easy way to find unusual
| charges etc. I haven't found a replacement.
| inerte wrote:
| Supposedly this is a selling point of
| https://copilot.money/ but I do it with YNAB which I prefer
| overall
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| I'll be another vote for ynab. It takes some getting used
| to, but it makes it very easy to see where things are, save
| for specific targets, verify bills are getting paid, etc.
|
| $100/year, but they don't sell your information or push you
| to buy other products, and it has dramatically helped
| communication about money with my wife. I have a handful of
| friends who also use it and swear by it.
| internet101010 wrote:
| Actual Budget is similar to old ynab but is free and
| self-hosted.
|
| https://github.com/actualbudget/actual
| Buttons840 wrote:
| I used YNAB 4, but gave them up for ethical reasons when
| they started charging yearly for their web app that was
| worse than the stand alone app (and the stand alone app
| was a cheaper one time payment). I just didn't want to
| see a company succeed by purposely switching to a worse
| but more expensive offering.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yeah, I wound up on Monarch since it was founded by the
| former product manager at Mint and has a similar modern
| consumer look.
|
| It's whitespace heavy though -- for people who like
| something that looks more like an enterprise software
| dashboard, there's Simplifi.
|
| It seems like Monarch and Simplifi are where the most Mint
| users have wound up, judging from various forum posts. And
| they have an extremely similar feature set and interface.
| But they are both paid.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Maybe I'm unusually anal retentive about this, but I have
| every bank account, PayPal, Venmo, both credit cards, every
| brokerage, 401(k), HSA, IRA, mortgage, everything... in
| Quicken, which I check every single day. 1. Start Quicken, 2.
| Hit Update, 3. Get Coffee, 4. Review everything in boldface
| to make sure it's not a surprise.
|
| I have the next month worth of bills and paychecks "below the
| line" as future transactions, so not only can know what's in
| my checking account today, but I know exactly, to the penny
| what _will_ be in my checking account on 18-Feb.
|
| I've in the past found credit card fraud/mistakes within a
| day of being charged, and have fixed them quickly, before
| even my next paper statement was printed.
|
| Some friends I know don't have any idea how much is in any of
| their accounts outside of occasionally seeing a number on an
| ATM receipt. They might have a budget, but no idea how much
| all their monthly charges add up to in reality. And yea, they
| always seem to be forgetting about some subscription or
| charge. I couldn't live like that--not for me.
| bombcar wrote:
| I used to be that way, now I rarely check anything. No time
| anymore, and all the software I used to use is not
| compatible/complicated to setup.
|
| Someday, I keep telling myself, I'll be down to one bank
| account, one credit card, and that's it.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Maybe I'm unusually anal retentive about this, but I have
| every bank account, PayPal, Venmo, both credit cards, every
| brokerage, 401(k), HSA, IRA, mortgage, everything... in
| Quicken
|
| This is something I'd like to have, but I don't want to use
| Quicken. Partially because I pretty much exclusively use
| Linux at home, and I don't want to have something as
| important as financials reliant on a maybe-it-will-work
| WINE translation layer. And partially because Quicken is
| now owned by Intuit, which is a corporation I'm
| particularly disinclined to reward with my patronage.
|
| Unfortunately, every time I've looked at ways to get
| statements delivered to me electronically from my various
| financial institutions, it seems that the available options
| are "don't" and "something that only works in Quicken."
| (There used to be some open file formats for exchanging
| information here, but it seems that institutions have
| started dropping support for them in favor of proprietary
| protocols, from what I can tell.) I'd be happy with
| something as meek as "email me a PDF statement"!
| schlauerfox wrote:
| GNUcash aint pretty, but it works.
| jcranmer wrote:
| My understanding it suffers from the "everyone is
| abandoning OFX" problem, leading it to be unable to
| ingest the data it needs.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| I wish there was some way to do this without handing over
| the credentials for my entire financial life to a 3rd party
| --which I refuse to do.
| ipince wrote:
| Autopay is evil. I have nothing on autopay.
|
| Instead, I have a monthly reminder to pay my bills every
| month, with a list of all the bills/sites that need to be
| paid. There's 11 things in the list, but not all of them have
| a balance every month. I do this towards the end of the month
| (instead of at the beginning of the month), so that I can
| include rent in it too, and pay _everything_. It lets me see
| whether my spending is creeping up and gives me an
| opportunity to cancel useless stuff. It doesn't take long
| (5-30 mins depending on how detailed I'm being).
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I call it Auto-steal.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Autopay did more to improve my credit score than anything
| else. If left to my own devices, I'll forget to pay bills.
| Autopay prevents that.
|
| It may be evil for you, but for me, it's an absolute
| lifesaver.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Yeah, even when I was living paycheck-to-paycheck, I used
| auto-pay.
|
| I'd just had a post-it note stuck to my monitor of the
| dates and usual amounts for the auto-pays, so I was never
| caught off guard or surprised amount money moving.
| nunez wrote:
| Autopay is amazing if you're careful with it.
|
| I have a bank account that all incoming money goes into and
| another that's just for autopay. I transfer the sum of the
| costs of my recurring expenses into the autopay account
| from the incoming account, and that's it. Literally set it
| and forget it. This combined with using Privacy disposable
| cards for 90% of these transactions and setting hard spend
| limits on them has allowed me to never look at a bill.
|
| I _used to_ have autopay deduct from a single account.
| Yeah, that's scary as hell and has caused heaps of
| problems. Not doing that again.
| foobarian wrote:
| Yes and then you log in and see:
|
| Apple $4.99
|
| Apple $1.99
|
| Apple $14.99
|
| Apple $4.99
|
| Apple $2.99
|
| Apple $9.99
|
| good luck!
| crazygringo wrote:
| Ha! I was _literally_ dealing with that exact issue last
| week as I was doing my Mint to Monarch migration.
|
| And thinking I'd to categorize my transactions as
| AppleCare+ vs software vs gaming vs cloud storage vs
| streaming, for budgeting purposes.
|
| And then just kind of gave up. Apple _seriously_ needs to
| put more detail in their transaction line, although I guess
| they can 't always when they combine things in a single
| charge. But even just different merchants would help
| between iCloud, Apple Store, App Store, and Apple Services.
| Or something.
| bombcar wrote:
| I _used_ to filter these by different cards, but now they
| 're all on the Apple Card. :(
| nlawalker wrote:
| I got a great tip here on HN: if your credit card supports
| email notifications for transactions, set it to alert you on
| every transaction. On my Citi card the notification is called
| "Transaction amount exceeds" and is configurable with a dollar
| amount, which I set to zero. Now I get an email within a minute
| or two of every charge that includes the amount and payee in
| the email. It's a great way to put recurring charges you might
| have forgotten about "in your face" and lets you skip reviewing
| your whole statement at the end of the month (and gives you a
| searchable "database" of charge history).
| howenterprisey wrote:
| I have this set up with push notifications on my phone and
| that's very helpful as well.
| criddell wrote:
| That would mean I would have to turn email notifications on
| _or_ get in the habit of checking my email every day.
|
| The searchable database of charge history would be nice
| though. My card number has changed a few times due to data
| breaches at places I've used the card and I don't think my
| credit card company's search is smart enough to follow
| branches.
| ipince wrote:
| Well, you don't have to check it _immediately_. I think as
| long as it's visible and you see in O(days) it would serve
| its purpose.
| godelski wrote:
| This sounds like it can get a bit overwhelming. I absolutely
| abhor notifications on my phone unless they are things that
| need my immediate attention. Email is a particular pain where
| it is difficult to impossible to differentiate spam from
| legitimate communications.
|
| I really do wish banks or visa/mastercard would offer virtual
| card functionality. It really would empower users to have
| more control over their money and improve security and
| privacy.
| mckn1ght wrote:
| I'm like you in that I hate notifications, but I love this
| idea at the same time, so I think I'll set up an email
| filter that sends them all past the inbox, right to a
| dedicated folder, where I can periodically review them all
| together. Sounds much better than logging into each CC
| provider separately, finding the statement area,
| downloading a clunky PDF, after probably having to change a
| password and confirm contact info is still the same, etc
| etc etc.
|
| A CLI to parse all the emails and roll them up into a nice
| summary would be a neat little project as well!
| godelski wrote:
| Actually this is not a bad idea. I was thinking phone
| notifications, but emails are much easier to control.
| Though I find filtering often not that great. I've been
| using Thunderbird, but if you have a suggested CLI email
| client that can "easily" (I live in the terminal, so
| that's the bar) integrate gmail and my work/school
| emails, allow me to hack on it, and __most importantly__
| has decent documentation, then I'd love to hear about it.
| I tried Mutt many years ago but experienced too much
| friction, but things change and I haven't revisited the
| topic.
| peruvian wrote:
| That's the point. Try it out for a month, get overwhelmed
| by your expenses, then cut back as you learn about them.
| After that month, turn the email notifications off and make
| a habit of checking the website every day or every so
| often.
| godelski wrote:
| This sounds better in theory than practice. When it comes
| to apps, I'm a privacy maximalist, turning off all the ad
| tracking and that I can, and a notification minimalist,
| turning off every notification that is not something that
| needs immediate attention or at least action within a
| short timeframe.
|
| But my settings are changed out from under me constantly.
| So I wouldn't trust being reliant upon them. Which in
| that case I'd rather have no signal, as this gets
| categorized differently in my brain where I think we are
| naturally inclined to believe any signal is stronger than
| it actually is. So it's harder to lull myself into a
| false sense of security and the friction is sometimes
| purposefully self inflicted. I can totally understand how
| the same explanation and justification can be used in the
| opposite direction though, to I guess this is a personal
| thing.
|
| I do still believe that there should be a __legal__
| requirement that users must verify and approve any price
| change to a reoccurring fixed rate subscription. I'm open
| to not being aware of nuance that needs to be considered
| or how it can/will be trivially abused, but I have a hard
| time seeing how this would not be simple basic consumer
| protection. I do not think it is in the public interest
| for companies to be able to employ strategies which are
| intentionally designed to trick the public and/or
| customers. While I appreciate you laying our your
| strategy (I just don't think it'll work for me but I'm
| sure it'll be beneficial to others) I want to make sure
| that we also do not codify coping mechanisms as solutions
| to problematic behaviors.
| scruple wrote:
| Alarm fatigue [0] is a very real phenomenon that I am sure
| (potentially, depending) translates to people in their
| everyday lives somehow, too. I personally disable
| notifications for practically everything except messages
| and weather on my phone. Anything else, I have to check it
| manually. I do get email notifications about charges to my
| CC, though, and I tend to review them fairly quickly
| because I check my email a few times a day.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue
| jjav wrote:
| > This sounds like it can get a bit overwhelming.
|
| Indeed, I wouldn't want that but glad it's an option.
|
| There's no need to review transactions the moment they
| happen to catch any fraud. It is fine to wait for the
| statement and review it once a month. You're still not
| liable, so there's no rush to do it immediately.
|
| > I really do wish banks or visa/mastercard would offer
| virtual card functionality.
|
| Some do, although for some reason it has never worked for
| me (but also have not tried debugging the process too
| much).
| mnw21cam wrote:
| My phone goes ping every time any money goes out of my
| account. Yes, at the beginning of the month I get a slew of
| pings for mortgage, power, water, etc, but it's worth it. A
| while back my phone went ping twice and I was phoning the
| bank within minutes of a couple of fraudulent payments being
| made - ironically just _before_ the bank sent me a text
| asking me if I was making the third one.
|
| Having it go ping every time like that is definitely a way to
| have good knowledge of what recurring payments you are
| making.
| thehoff wrote:
| I do this too for all our cards. I still go in everyday to
| check but the email notifications are great. Every couple
| years we get a charge that is fraudulent and I always catch
| it before the bank starts calling (if they even do that).
|
| On topic, its a great reminder to see say the Netflix charge
| happened and how much. An example is we subscribed to Viki
| for a couple months and forgot to cancel. Seeing that charge
| was a great reminder to poll the house if anyone was still
| using it.
| bombcar wrote:
| Apple Card (and _some but not all_ cards you add to Apple
| Wallet) pop up a little notification every time they 're
| charged.
|
| It can be nice, but you might miss the nighttime ones.
| k2enemy wrote:
| I do this as well, but with Chase, and use a filter to stick
| them into their own folder so they don't hit my INBOX. I use
| maildir for my local email and have shell scripts built on
| top of easy filesystem access to my credit card purchases.
|
| Oddly, I get emails for everything except gasoline purchases.
| I'm afraid to contact support because in the extremely
| unlikely event that it gets forwarded to the correct people,
| the attempted fix would break something in my workflow.
| matwood wrote:
| I love getting charge alerts. In restaurants I'll normally
| get the alert on my watch before the waiter gets back to the
| table. Though the SO sometimes gets annoyed when I text her
| about buying something before she's even left the store :D
| ok123456 wrote:
| I've been doing this for several years. Once, I caught
| someone trying to make a fraudulent ACH withdrawal from my
| account and was able to stop it basically instantly.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| >Seems absent-minded to me.
|
| This is an unrealistic attitude. One can insult people all day,
| but it doesn't change the fact that society doesn't work
| properly if we don't account for things humans do, even if it
| only looks like they are hurting themselves. On one hand, we
| shouldn't use law to _force_ people to "be responsible for
| themselves" in petty cases (as opposed to e.g. forcing people
| to have car insurance), but if _enough_ people commit the same
| mistake, it 's almost by-definition not purely their fault -
| and on a more objective note, it is certainly pointless to
| waste time wondering how much of it is carelessness and how
| much of it is reasonable given what else is going on in
| people's lives and what their experiences and competencies are
| like. We simply _must_ give a shit, as natural as it feels to
| want to just let people deal with things themselves.
|
| Again, one can continue to consider these people mostly at
| fault or try to get them educated or just make fun of them or
| hyperbolically lament the fall of society or whatever one's
| preferred flavor of reaction is, _but_ we also have to solve
| the active problem. Modern society is too integrated and
| complex to not give a shit.
|
| Ideally, what I'd like to be able to say is that modern humans
| are too sympathetic and imaginative to not give a shit.
| godelski wrote:
| It's easy for things to get hidden, especially when changes in
| already small amounts of money. I'm a bit embarrassed that this
| happened to me once. My spotify student account ended and it
| got switched over to premium automatically. Probably got an
| email somewhere but they also send spam so it likely got
| misread or filtered. On the bank statement, which it was a
| payment I was expecting, just not the right amount and it
| occurs at a similar time of the month as a bunch of other
| bills.
|
| I think there is a rather easy way that we could solve this in
| a fairly robust way. It could be a legal requirement that when
| pricing on reoccurring subscription transactions changes that
| the user has to log in and confirm the change. The reason I'd
| actually suggest a legal route is because there's many
| companies that are highly incentivized to create dark patterns
| that will enroll people in subscriptions at a low or zero rate
| and then automatically transfer them to higher or paid
| accounts. It can happen to the best of us, but I'm more
| concerned with the not best of us. Personally I'm not a fan of
| a system that allows the easy extraction of money from people
| who are not as technically literate (i.e. most people). And I
| really don't think it is a good system to allow legitimate
| businesses to employ the same tactics as spammers.
|
| If you read the article you'll find that the cases they talk
| about are specifically mentioning people who signed up for one
| thing but got a different thing instead. These are deceptive
| practices, full stop.
|
| While we're at it, I'd love it if companies could stop sending
| spam from the same accounts they send important information.
| This dark pattern successfully teaches people to ignore any
| incoming email to them and explicitly allows this shit to
| happen. If contracts change, they should simply require a
| confirmation of that change. Maybe there's something I'm not
| seeing, but this sounds like a very reasonable and not very
| controversial take.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I have a cheap VPS that I'm not using but I get the bill every
| month. Every time I see it I think "I should cancel that" but
| then I think "maybe I'll get around to doing something with it
| this month" and I let it go another month.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| One option to consider would be to develop locally on a VM or
| container and then when it's in a "let others play" state,
| then fire that VM back up and push your artifacts or
| container to it.
| scruple wrote:
| My wife and I review CC and bank activity every 2nd Sunday.
| It's part of our budgeting. We both stubbornly refused to take
| our finances seriously early in life, before we met. By the
| time we had met, we had both crawled our way out of CC debt and
| were both independently taking it Seriously. We combined our
| finances pretty early in our relationship, like before year 2.
| We used to "meet" once every month to discuss this stuff but
| since having kids we've pushed it to two weeks because it is,
| in our experience, so easy to go overboard if you're not
| regularly reminding yourself.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > It takes 5 minutes to skim your transactions, look for
| suspicious charges, get a quick read on where money is going.
|
| If you use your credit card heavily, then this takes a lot more
| than 5 minutes. Keeping the CC usage light in order to make it
| easier to manage is important to me, and a key part of that is
| to avoid recurring charges as much as possible.
| francisofascii wrote:
| Don't disagree. Many of my charges are some vague Amazon charge
| that my wife made, which could be a product delivered, or a
| subscription. So Amazon subscriptions is another place to
| check. It would take time to match up each charge to the actual
| order.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| Most HNers have never held a job outside of a high paying tech
| job. When you're working retail and struggling to pay bills,
| literally _all_ you think about is money. So much so that it is
| debilitating from the stress. When you 're under that much
| pressure constantly, it is very easy to miss something.
|
| "But, if it's that bad, they shouldn't even be signing up for
| this stuff!", I hear some of you saying. You look for an escape
| wherever you can. Some little thing that will pull you, even
| for a moment, out of the monotony of the daily grind. Don't
| blame these people.
| BuckRogers wrote:
| I worked my way up, I'm 41 and working non-stop since I was
| 12 receiving a check as a paperboy. Worked at tire shops,
| autobody, whatever you can imagine. Before I was a paperboy,
| I ground down spot welding tips in my dad's shop to buy my
| toys and video games. Worked night shifts during community
| college and university. Fully qualified for SS in my 20s.
| Never a dollar from mommy and daddy. I haven't even received
| a Christmas or birthday gift in 20 years.
|
| Developer now (a career mistake honestly), but back then I
| would've never had any subscriptions. Can't imagine being
| back in those shoes and having the TIME to fully utilize
| Netflix, Spotify etc.
|
| My advice is if you're in that position, work more. Study
| more or work more. Trying to avoid it with some escape like
| watching Netflix is not productive and only makes things
| worse.
|
| When I was in college, I kept a strict schedule. Classes from
| 9AM-1PM, work from 2PM-7PM, 7PM-12:30AM I was in the library
| studying until it closed. My grades suffered but there wasn't
| any time for TV. I simply cannot imagine getting ahead NOT
| doing this, and sitting on Spotify or Netflix instead. Almost
| scary, guaranteed way to remain a dud. But I'm sure it's
| common. Given life is harder now than it was 50 years ago,
| I'm sure the lack of effort + lazy ways is why everyone
| thinks times are so tough. If times are tough, we need to
| become tough.
|
| For me, that life was satisfying. I needed no "escape", as I
| liked and struggle to remain productive today and feel more
| than ever the need for an escape. I often tell people my
| hobby is "survival". Fixing my truck, reviewing/fine tuning
| my finances, working on my house, strategizing for life. The
| issue isn't not enough time watching Youtube. It's that I'm
| not productive enough.
|
| Doubly true for the "downtrodden" poor. It's just that most
| of them are not the forgotten men, the abandoned hardy stock
| from the upper midwest that know what it takes to get ahead.
| They've been groomed to complain and sulk instead. It's a lot
| easier. When I meet these people I ask them, "have you done
| your best for the Lord?". They have everything they need,
| breath in their lungs. All I ever needed. It's disrespectful
| to Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ to not do our best in
| life. Once I see these people exhaust all possible options to
| improve their condition, then I'll give them a handout and
| sympathy. Till then, no Netflix, more work. Or suffer,
| whatever is preferred.
| verall wrote:
| Good for you that you're so good at things but I think it's
| pretty icky to blame people who aren't as good at things as
| I am.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| See, I used to buy into this reasoning, but now, I'm not so
| sure.
|
| You can easily say the same thing about someone who does work
| a high-tech job. You make so much money you stop looking at
| your bank accounts. There are so many new grads or even late
| 20s professionals who barely manage their finances beyond 1-2
| months. I would argue middle-class folks manage the idea of a
| "6 month emergency fund" a lot better than those in high-tech
| who make 200k+ a year and just don't think about money
| anymore.
|
| I think the right reasons are:
|
| - folks don't know how to do this (literally what does it
| means to review your statements and check your accounts +
| what to look for)
|
| - folks do not understand how manageable it can be once you
| spend the initial activation energy
|
| - last and maybe most controversial, folks don't have the
| ability to make it a habit (which then causes every few
| months for it to become a big hurdle).
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >You can easily say the same thing about someone who does
| work a high-tech job
|
| No you F-ing can't, and if you even remotely think that,
| you have never experienced poverty. Life's a lot different
| when your bills are $X this month and working 60 hours only
| makes you $X-$1000. "Change your expenses" Oh yeah? Am I
| supposed to WILL cheaper apartments into existence? Am I
| supposed to magically reduce the cost of my groceries? Am I
| supposed to pray away the late fee on my cell phone plan
| because I literally had $10 in my bank account and couldn't
| pay it?
|
| It is expensive to be poor, intentionally so. It is a huge
| source of profit for numerous companies to make poor people
| pay more for the same service and access.
|
| I'm sick and tired of privileged jerks saying "Just be
| better with your money" as if you can magically stretch
| your $15 and hour job to cover $1500 a month in rent, or
| that you should have no problem scheduling things when you
| can't even know your work schedule the week before.
|
| What part of "personal responsibility" changes that your
| rent goes up %5 every single damn year, and your pay check
| does not?
|
| I grew up in poverty. I only escaped it through sheer luck
| that I am above average intelligence and my hyperfixation
| was computers and computing history and programming, and
| despite a literal full ride scholarship to a second rate
| state college, I still couldn't afford it without my
| jackass Rich Uncle, who is exactly the type to complain
| about "personal responsibility", writing a $10K check. Now
| I pay $20k or more in taxes every year, for the rest of my
| life, which clearly offsets the 16 years times $10k a year
| "tuition" it costs to put someone through public school.
|
| But notably, that doesn't undo the actual, physiological
| changes in my brain that come from growing up in poverty.
| These changes cause you to make less rational and less
| value-positive decisions. But no, definitely my fault that
| my brain broke when my mom spent most nights screaming and
| crying and trying to not starve to death.
|
| Meanwhile she has literally won awards in the state for
| being one of the best teachers. For 30 years. She still
| cries about the suffering we experienced. But no, better
| that poor people get screwed over if they don't make
| perfect decisions, that they are empirically wired to not
| be able to do as easily as someone who grew up in a not
| financially stressed household.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Not only that, but people really underestimate how locked
| into a difficult financial situation you can get. Yeah,
| you can _just_ get a better job or _just_ move where
| there are more opportunities, except you need time to
| make all of that happen; if you 're working dogshit hours
| just to keep the lights on and you have a family to feed,
| finding the time to go to interviews or to figure out
| where to live may not be on the table, at least not
| immediately. Especially if one can't even afford the move
| itself.
|
| Those whom have reached financial escape velocity, or
| never had to reach it because of good fortune, often are
| biased towards believing that their current lifestyle is
| entirely the result of their own decisions and didn't
| involve luck.
|
| People should act with personal responsibility, but all
| the personal responsibility in the world won't make a
| winner in a losing situation. Anyone can do what Warren
| Buffet does, but Buffet doesn't risk starvation or having
| his children live on the street when things don't work
| out.
| jjeaff wrote:
| Most credit and debit cards have the option to get a text
| message for any transaction over a certain amount. all of my
| cards are set to send me a text for any transaction over $0.
| nunez wrote:
| I definitely understand. There are several reasons why I can
| sympathize with folks that don't check their bank statements
| daily/weekly and miss leaking transactions.
|
| First, there is a lot of crap in a bank statement. They are
| tiring to parse.
|
| Second, logging into and using your banking portal is a chore.
| First, you have to remember your password. Not everyone is
| using a password manager. (Love the work that Apple has done to
| bridge this gap, and I'm ABSOLUTELY LOVING passkeys.) Second,
| you have to present a second factor. Some (few) banks are with
| the times and use a TOTP second factor. Many use SMS two-
| factor. Many will CALL you with the code. All of them suck.
| Then you have to navigate the new UIs that look very pretty and
| are designed to simplify common functions (mostly checking your
| balance) but have made things like filtering your statement by
| transactions from today more difficult.
|
| Third, many merchants use very confusing IDs that make it
| confusing to see where a transaction originated from (for
| example: a restaurant that uses an abbreviated form of their
| former name or their parent company's name in the merchant ID).
| Apple, for example, uses APPLE.COM/BILL for iCloud _and_
| AppleCare transactions. This segues into my last reason why
| navigating transactions periodically sucks.
|
| Tracing a previous expense is an AWFUL experience 99.95% of the
| time.
|
| I capture every single receipt and bank alert into Expensify
| (moving into Google Sheets), so tracing an unknown charge is
| very easy for me (search my email; failing that, search
| Expensify; failing that, log into bank, which is painful; see
| above). However, I had to spend significant effort building
| systems and writing code to accomplish this since there are
| basically zero services that do this for consumer spending.
|
| Most people don't save receipts. Those that do often don't save
| them digitally. I know this because I work in consulting, an
| industry where we have to track receipts to submit expense
| reports, and EVERYONE whines about this. Many have to block
| time in their calendar to get this done.
|
| Regardless, even if you do save all of your receipts and
| alerts, you still need to log into the portal for the vendor
| that charged that $5.95 and find that charge. Portals that can
| be even harder to log in and navigate through than banks.
|
| Determining which Apple service that APPLE.COM/BILL charge was
| associated with, for example? Good fucking luck. It's clicks on
| clicks on clicks. (They also make you use a single card for ALL
| digital purchases you make with them. Want to buy an album?
| Want to buy AppleCare for your new iPhone? Are you forced to
| subscribe to this super critical app on that iPhone that used
| to be free? The same card is used for all of that. This is the
| biggest reason why I've been investing time in moving App Store
| subscriptions into separate accounts. But even this sucks
| because many app vendors will only use the App Store for
| managing subscriptions!)
|
| Consequently, when your statement, which you spent five minutes
| _just trying to get to_, presents an unknown $5.95 charge (that
| you didn't get alerted on if you had alerts on because your
| bank won't send alerts for anything below $50), it's easier to
| say "welp" and charge it back (a whole process in and of
| itself) or say "it's five dollars" and forget about it.
| dudul wrote:
| I do review CC statements diligently. I use GnuCash for my
| household accounting and refuse to use any SaaS or automated
| solution. I do want to review my statements, be it CC, pay
| stubs, 401k, etc so I know what's happening.
|
| Yeah it takes a bit of time once or twice a month, but it's
| worth it I think.
|
| Twice a year or so I catch "late fees" on my spouse's CC that
| shouldn't be there. Banks just seem to randomly do that because
| in most cases they'll get away with it.
| cooper_j wrote:
| Its so ironic because WSJ is one of those subscriptions...
| capital_guy wrote:
| and the WSJ is one of those subscription companies that uses
| dark patterns. When I had WSJ ~2 years ago, there was a
| separate page for people living in California where you could
| click to cancel, and everyone else had to jump through hoops.
|
| Glad the FTC is going after this nonsense [1].
|
| [1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-
| releases/2023/03/...
| mfwit wrote:
| And when you do try to cancel, you have to chat or call somebody.
| I'm looking at you SiriusXM.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Thanks for the heads up. I will never try them (buying a new
| car soon).
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Dealers get a commission for converting you, keep an eye on
| the paperwork.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Excellent, good point, thanks
| mikestew wrote:
| We bought a new car last April. We also had XM radio about
| fifteen years ago. Much like GP comment, we will never sign
| up for SiriusXM ever again, so much so that we didn't even
| bother with the "free" six month subscription with new car
| purchase...because I don't want to do deal with canceling, or
| deal with anything to do with SiriusXM. I'll sing a cappella
| at the top of my lungs before I'll be so desperate as to turn
| on SiriusXM.
|
| That's right, SiriusXM can't even _give_ us their service,
| that 's much they poisoned that water well.
| dave78 wrote:
| I had XM (before the Sirius merger) and cancelled it >10 years
| ago. The process was difficult enough that I would never even
| remotely consider signing up for them again. If it had been
| more painless, I may have resubscribed at some point. Instead,
| they've completely poisoned their brand with me permanently.
|
| I've heard enough horror stories about other classes of
| subscription-type things (gym memberships, newspaper
| subscriptions, etc.) that I don't even consider signing up for
| those - entire industries that I write off because of bad
| behavior when it comes to cancelling subscriptions.
|
| I always wonder if companies think through the consequences of
| their aggressive "retention" efforts.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > I always wonder if companies think through the consequences
| of their aggressive "retention" efforts.
|
| Probably not beyond the next quarterly results.
| massysett wrote:
| "They recognized that getting a new card is one of the rare times
| you must actively renew your automatically renewing
| subscriptions, since you have to update the payment information
| on file with those companies."
|
| This isn't true: I've had subscriptions roll over to the new
| credit card number - and not just for a month or two. Apparently
| the bank will continue to process them (I'd rather they didn't.)
| bbarnett wrote:
| The bank will "helpfully" tell retail partners the new expiry
| date, and 3 digit code. It's to help you, supposedly.
| el_benhameen wrote:
| I get the concern. At the same time, when my card was stolen
| last year, it _was_ helpful to not have to update my billing
| info on 8,000 different vendor websites or risk having an
| account cancelled. I think tying a credit card to an account
| number versus an account as an entity is becoming somewhat
| antiquated.
| chucksta wrote:
| It goes both ways, a couple years ago I had to deal with a
| scammer who the bank kept "helping" with each new card they
| issued me. It happened like 5 times before it stopped,
| nothing I could do.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| You issue a chargeback. It's been a while since I've
| worked on these systems, but IIRC back in the day you
| would get a refund and they would be penalized an extra
| $25 or so on top of it. If they get too many they can
| loose their merchant account.
|
| We always made cancels easy in our system, and if someone
| issued a chargeback we would ban their email from signing
| up again.
| chucksta wrote:
| I did, the charge back process wasn't the issue. Each
| time I would call, they would give me a new card and
| number, I'd go update everywhere. Then a few days later
| there would be a new fraud charge on the new card.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| That's one of the reasons I enjoy using PayPal and Google
| Pay. Because my payment card details simply aren't on file
| with any vendors anymore. And I get a dashboard full of
| recurring payments where I can unilaterally cut anyone off.
| And I can modify which payment card they're using for each.
| grotorea wrote:
| Missing a payment and having to pay a late fee or
| interruption to an important service seems bad in fairness.
| foobarian wrote:
| Yes, miraculously my EZ-Pass bill is still being paid perfectly
| successfully even after two replacements for the *original*
| card expired since, and one was canceled due to theft. Magic!
| paxys wrote:
| That happens in case an existing card renews (or is replaced
| after getting lost etc.) If you get a net new card then
| retailers aren't getting that info.
| pxeboot wrote:
| Visa calls this "Visa Account Updater (VAU)" [1]. MC and AMEX
| have something similar.
|
| [1] https://developer.visa.com/capabilities/vau/overview
| bonton89 wrote:
| There's apparently some kind of service that automatically
| updates payment processors when you get a new card. Seems kind
| of stupid since one of the main reasons to get a new card is
| that is compromised and you might just end up sending the new
| card info to the same company that lost it or is refusing to
| cancel your subscription.
| ip26 wrote:
| It's easy to decide it's malicious, but after replacing a lost
| card that was on file for what must have been fifty different
| payments, I would rather they did.
|
| Even incurred some chargeback fees in the process because I
| forgot to update a few vendors.
| paxys wrote:
| Exactly. My cards have been getting replaced on average once
| a year, either due to expiry or some new security feature or
| whatever else. It would be a monumental pain to keep updating
| every online account, so I'm glad this feature exists.
| xnx wrote:
| It's disappointing but not surprising that no credit card company
| that I know of provides simple built-in summaries of past 12
| month spend by merchant and merchant category.
|
| Edit: It looks like my bank has some basic view accessible
| through a submenu.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I can see past 12 months by category in Bank of America.
|
| https://www.bankofamerica.com/online-banking/mobile-and-onli...
|
| I do not know if BoA offers a breakdown by merchant though.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Amex too.
| the_snooze wrote:
| Similarly, it sucks that banks don't allow you to unilaterally
| stop recurring payments on your credit card. Some companies
| make cancelling a subscription like getting out of a Saw trap.
|
| Sure, there are proxies like Privacy.com and PayPal that let
| you do this, but this should be a standard feature everywhere.
| brianleb wrote:
| To chime in with the others, my Chase card offers this service
| automatically as well. I think most major credit card companies
| are starting to offer these services because they want a piece
| of the pie that companies like Intuit (through Mint, now Credit
| Karma) are grabbing by just siphoning up financial data.
| matwood wrote:
| CapOne does, along with a quick view of 'recurring charges'.
| Amex also lets you view by category across custom date ranges,
| custom tags, etc...
| waynesonfire wrote:
| The core disappointed with credit cards and also banking in
| general in the US, is the existance of a company called Plaid--
| which generated $170 million of revenue in 2020 parsing
| transaction data.
|
| There should be a standard interface to pull transaction data
| without having to rely on a third party as it rapes your
| privacy.
|
| Notably, this apparently exists in EU.
| oarla wrote:
| On the contrary, most big banks provide year end summaries that
| can be download ed as csv to analyze them in Excel.
| teeray wrote:
| It's almost like we need legislation to reign in subscriptions.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Or can't figure out how to cancel.
| lucidguppy wrote:
| You can set up alerts for all charges going to your card to your
| phone.
| quartz wrote:
| I recently had my credit card stolen which is a great forcing
| function to audit subscriptions because you have to dig them all
| up to update the associated payment methods.
|
| After combing through my credit card bills to identify all the
| recurring charges my conclusion was less that I have too many
| subscriptions but that cost creep is out of control on them.
|
| Ex: I stopped paying attention to my storage unit monthly bill
| because it was on autopay. Turns out now after 4 years I'm paying
| more than double the published rate. Called the storage facility
| and they said the only way around it is to rent a new unit at the
| new rate and move my things there to start the process all over
| again.
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| Same. New York Times always gets me without fail. They always
| start at something absurd like $3/mo or $5 for six months, and
| before you know it I'm auditing my statements and see that I've
| been paying $34.99/mo for the last two years. Repeat ad
| infinitum.
| bratsche wrote:
| They're also difficult to cancel. They gave me a student
| discount for using my .edu email address, but after awhile I
| realized I wasn't really using it so I tried to cancel. They
| work really hard to make that difficult to do.
| quartz wrote:
| Not sure if it's still the case but it used to be that if
| you changed your address to California you could cancel
| online since IIRC it's a law there.
|
| I have this memory of having to do that to get rid of the
| wsj after I made the fatal mistake of forgetting to cancel
| after a trial.
| zachwdc wrote:
| When I need to cancel something that is hard to cancel, I
| get a free virtual card from Privacy (privacy.com), then
| switch my subscription to use the virtual card number, then
| pause or cancel the card in Privacy.
| godelski wrote:
| I feel like a great way to solve these <businesses practices
| that are indistinguishable from scams> is to require
| confirmations when payments change (maybe with exception of
| variable rate loans?).
|
| If you work at a bank, maybe pitch a notifications system
| that detects reoccurring transactions that are in fixed
| amounts that notifies customers when they change. In fact,
| also pitch giving your customers a fucking list of
| reoccurring transactions.
|
| Seriously, how is so much software so bad and so many
| products lack very basic functionality that would not be very
| difficult to implement but have high utility? I mean my
| laundry app doesn't even sort the laundry rooms in
| alphabetical order, they're just in a random fucking list.
| It's impressive to me we have systems that are so low value
| you can hire software engineers that don't know about sort. I
| don't think AI is going to replace a lot of coding jobs, but
| I suspect it'll replace these jobs (I just fear it'll also
| make this type of software more common).
| pc86 wrote:
| > If you work at a bank, maybe pitch a notifications system
| that detects reoccurring transactions that are in fixed
| amounts that notifies customers when they change.
|
| I get exactly these types of notifications from both
| Discover and Citi.
| starik36 wrote:
| Ah yeah. The good ole' storage unit scam. They all raise the
| prices about every 6 months. I just rent a U-Haul for a day and
| move it to a new place. And it forces me to throw things away
| that I truly don't need. Over the years, the amount of stuff I
| have has been shrinking and I have less to move.
|
| Rinse and repeat every now and then.
| bombcar wrote:
| My final calculus was adding up what I had spent on storage
| units, and realizing it was _way_ more than the _replacement_
| cost of most of the crap, so I reduced it down to personal
| momentos only.
| ghaff wrote:
| In general, based on various family/partner-related
| experiences, is that you either have a specific I need more
| room for a specific set of activities that I have a
| concrete plan to use OR I have a specific plan to have more
| space for this crap--which I want to keep. A lot of people
| pay for storage space with no real plan which is just going
| to be tossed at some point anyway.
| jdofaz wrote:
| I've been reconciling my transactions in GnuCash for 20 years,
| I've been pretty good at catching charges I don't expect.
|
| I also set the credit cards to send me an email for any
| transaction over $1.
| bruceb wrote:
| Alternative headline: People who actively use their subscriptions
| are being subsided buy those who don't. If you use the gym a lot
| be grateful people are paying that don't. If they did, the gym
| would have no room.
|
| While bits based subs are not quite the same, still holds that if
| people who don't need that sub any more cancelled then others
| would probably pay more.
| daxfohl wrote:
| IDK if that holds. If pricing is such that people would
| probably pay more, then the business will raise the price. The
| fact that they're getting free money from zombie subscriptions
| doesn't really change things.
|
| Though perhaps you could say businesses then actively reduce
| pricing to keep things just under the zombie radar, but that's
| even more effed up: it means the pricing strategy is such that
| zombie accounts are actually the business's goal, not just a
| side effect.
| bonton89 wrote:
| I think it does. The amount of effort people will put in and
| outrage that will ensue is going to scale up with the price
| of the service. So there is probably a careful identified max
| here.
|
| But they also use the "only $2 for the first 6 months" thing
| to get you hooked first and then wait for you to become
| complacent and forget about it.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| The blame falls also on businesses which take money for services
| they don't deliver. They often know, and otherwise often could
| know, when subscribers are not using the service. If you're a
| business, you should earn your revenue, otherwise you are frauds.
| This particular behavior is little better than taking money and
| simply refusing to provide service. Don't tell me it's
| unintentional - you know what's happening and could easily stop
| it.
|
| It should be shame that also falls on them, but somehow we give
| businesses a pass. No matter how awful or shameful, people say
| 'it's business' and those magic words absolve every evil. If you
| took monthly payment from your elderly neighbor to shovel their
| walk and it never snowed, it would be shameful to keep taking it
| - people's opinions of you would change negatively if they heard
| about it. If you said 'well, they have autopay setup and didn't
| stop it', you would look even worse!
| bombcar wrote:
| The way I see it, if they _can_ register if you 're using it,
| then after a year of disuse (or getting close to it) they
| should send a "we will cancel this for you" type notices.
|
| If it's business to business, that's more on both sides.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Interested in filing public comments on this if the FTC asks
| for them?
| cptskippy wrote:
| This is what Credit Cards do. They're shady AF but have no
| problem cancelling your card due to inactivity.
| thriftwy wrote:
| I believe this is implemented in Russia: I did not check that
| but when I sign up for some streaming service, after some time
| they start begging me to watch something and then stop charging
| me. I guess they may only charge on the months when I've showed
| up. They may resume it immediately when I come back, though.
|
| Myself would like to know how that works in detail.
| Alupis wrote:
| > The blame falls also on businesses which take money for
| services they don't deliver. They often know, and otherwise
| often could know, when subscribers are not using the service.
| If you're a business, you should earn your revenue, otherwise
| you are frauds.
|
| I disagree. I routinely go _months_ in between using some of my
| various subscriptions - be it Netflix, Hulu, Audible, etc. I
| would be very upset if they cancelled on me... I maintain the
| subscriptions because I can afford to do so and because I enjoy
| the convenience of having it available when I want it without
| having to go through some sort of account activation ritual.
|
| People need to have personal responsibility. Review your
| bank/credit accounts and cancel subscriptions if you want -
| it's your money so _take responsibility_.
|
| This line of reasoning reminds me of the petulant discussion
| revolving around overdraft fees... as-if it's difficult to
| spend 3 seconds tapping a button in your banking app.
| eropple wrote:
| I don't really see how this follows. A perfectly reasonable
| option that doesn't affect your use case at all would be
| "don't charge a customer who didn't use the service during
| that period." AWS doesn't charge me for an empty S3 bucket,
| Netflix shouldn't charge for zero minutes of video watched
| that month. Simple as!
|
| The downside, of course, is that this _does_ mean you can 't
| ride the Personal Responsibility bicycle and look down at a
| generally frazzled and overloaded population, but that's a
| sacrifice I'm willing to have you make.
| Alupis wrote:
| What's wrong with people putting on their adulting pants
| and actually being responsible? Why outsource personal
| responsibility to a third party? That seems, absurd.
|
| "Frazzled and overloaded" is not an excuse for not looking
| at your bank account _one time_ in 6 months or longer. That
| 's just plain old fashioned irresponsible.
|
| If you are at a stage in life where a $10 subscription is
| hurting, then it stands to reason you _should_ monitor
| those things.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > What's wrong with people putting on their adulting
| pants and actually being responsible? Why outsource
| personal responsibility to a third party? That seems,
| absurd.
|
| This is a poor perspective to have, and the purpose of
| government is to protect its citizens from predatory
| behavior. You're entitled to the opinion, but I vote for
| people who protect citizens, because that is where the
| greatest value is in aggregate improvement (vs "personal
| responsibility"). Existing is different levels of
| difficulty for everyone, and personal responsibility
| projection is of little value. But it is great if you're
| crushing it taking care of yourself.
|
| (very similar to overdraft fees and upcoming rules to
| compress them by the Biden admin and the CFPB)
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| People don't cancel shit because they don't know it's
| charging, they don't cancel shit because businesses make
| it artificially hard to do so, oftentimes requiring you
| to connect with a representative over chat or phone and
| having them argue with you and try to re-sell you the
| product. Almost every subscription I have right now was
| started with a free trial with a few buttons, but
| canceling? Canceling is usually a 20+ minute task of
| sitting somewhere on a computer or on a phone (or worse,
| both) when it could be EXACTLY as many buttons.
|
| And we know that, because Apple basically mandated it
| with App Store subscriptions. Cancelling subscriptions
| there takes seconds. And we also know that the various
| subscription companies absolutely hate it.
|
| The one that specifically burns me to no end is I recall
| hearing from a friend that they were on the phone with a
| representative from one of those meditation apps trying
| to cancel their subscription, and just, your product
| literally is made _for people who struggle with mental
| health issues and especially anxiety,_ and making that
| base of customers jump through social hoops of fire, and
| argue with another person and make them stand their
| ground on wanting to cancel, is a SUPREMELY CLASSLESS
| MOVE.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| It's a perfectly reasonable point that the company has
| all the information necessary and has the ability to
| automate a system which charges you only when you
| actually use the service, or hell, even just a system
| that emails you a reminder for not using the service
| you're paying for (Amazon kind of does this regarding
| their Music service as part of Prime, and I love them for
| it, even though I still don't use it). They don't
| actually have to burden society with the expectation of
| monitoring subscriptions.
|
| You might as well be saying that people should take
| personal responsibility and do their taxes manually if
| they don't want to pay $50/year to use turbotax instead
| of pushing for a system where the government sends you an
| estimate that is likely to be correct for most people
| (since they're already doing that anyway).
| jjav wrote:
| > If you are at a stage in life where a $10 subscription
| is hurting, then it stands to reason you should monitor
| those things.
|
| Unfortunately people for whom $10/mo hurts are usually
| working three part time jobs while also trying to get the
| kids to/from school and take care of them. So I can see
| why they might not have time.
| Clamchop wrote:
| These patterns work on adults and are economic
| inefficiencies whether you subscribe to strict personal
| accountability or not. Good policy improves individual
| and social outcomes.
|
| Choose to improve things, even if your ideal is that
| everyone would take care of it themselves.
| jjeaff wrote:
| this is exactly what Slack does (or did, I don't know if
| they still do). they only charge you for employees that
| have used slack during the month. though I don't know what
| "use" entails.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Use means account is in an "active" state, so no, not
| really what parent is talking about.
| wrs wrote:
| Yeah, that was great, wasn't it? Slack was bought by
| Salesforce so they now do the standard enterprise
| pricing, annual contracts with user counts and "true-ups"
| (never "true-downs").
| themacguffinman wrote:
| It screws over other use cases because it changes the
| economics of these streaming services. Monthly
| subscriptions for media, especially ones like Netflix,
| account for bingeing followed by dead periods amortized
| into the monthly price. Only counting active periods will
| break that amortization and the monthly price increases as
| a result.
|
| If someone doesn't binge and their lifestyle includes
| watching things more consistently, they will pay a higher
| price to subsidize people who don't manage their own money.
| It is of course possible to accommodate everything by
| adding all kinds of choices but it costs time and effort
| and complexity to setup those systems, and those costs are
| always passed down to the consumer. As someone who manages
| my own financial life, I'd prefer not to pay those costs
| for people who don't.
|
| I doubt the ability to look down will go away either,
| people who lack even this minimal amount of personal
| responsibility have endless ways of losing money and
| falling behind those who strive for personal
| responsibility. It's very costly and difficult for third
| parties to fix this kind of financial apathy.
| eropple wrote:
| You know, you're right, it would affect that use case. On
| the other hand, "I would have to pay a higher amount of
| money for my teevee if they stopped bleeding people for
| no services rendered" is a really funny thing to get on
| the the Personal Responsibility bicycle about. Like, you
| could've just said "I don't want to pay more" and I guess
| that'd be mildly unfortunate for you, maybe I could've
| found some sympathy for that viewpoint. Instead you got
| on that bicycle, just like the other person, and doubled
| down on the Fun At Parties thing. "I don't want to pay
| more because _I_ practice Personal Responsibility, please
| bask in my my perceived moral value. "
|
| And that makes me think a little more. So after doing
| that thinking, here's what I realized.
|
| It can still be about Personal Responsibility for you and
| the other person if you have to pay your own freight
| about it. In fact--it's more! You get to exercise so much
| more Personal Responsibility when you aren't _being
| subsidized by_ other people, even. When you are standing
| on your own two feet in such a Personally Responsible
| manner.
|
| Isn't that nice?
| themacguffinman wrote:
| It appears like rationalization to you (edit for context:
| the parent comment said it was rationalizing before it
| was edited) because you've already made up your mind
| about the malicious intent of companies who use this
| model. The reality is that companies can't know if
| they're "bleeding people for no services rendered"
| because of bingeing behavior. Someone watching a lot then
| staying off for a few months is difficult to distinguish
| from someone who has forgotten about their subscription
| for a few months.
|
| The easiest and most efficient way for a company to know
| that you're not providing value to them is by cancelling
| your subscription. I agree that companies making this
| difficult is bad, but many services don't make this
| difficult. Instead, you're asking them to read the mind
| of their customers which is not easy. Netflix does treat
| extreme periods of inactivity (IIRC more than a year I
| think?) as a reasonable signal that you've forgotten
| about it.
|
| > You get to exercise so much more Personal
| Responsibility when you aren't free-riding off other
| people, even.
|
| I don't think you're really understanding the point.
| People who don't exercise any personal responsibility
| over their finances are the ones who are free-riding off
| people who do. That's because when you don't manage your
| finances and you refuse to shoulder the cost for that,
| the time & effort and complexity it costs to accommodate
| that has to be paid by someone who isn't you.
|
| Edit: I'm not sure there's anything I can say to sway
| your mind about this since you've really honed in on the
| emotional angle to this but I think it's worth pointing
| out that this isn't really a moralizing thing to me, I
| have been and know many people who fall short, I don't
| treat it morally. It's largely about resource allocation
| and behavioral incentives. Asking central organizations
| like a corporation to infer the correct thing for lots of
| consumers is very difficult and costly, it's overall much
| more efficient to ask consumers to signal their desires
| themselves, it's why markets tend to be more efficient.
| Making consumers pay the cost of mismanaging their
| finances also discourages them from doing it, increasing
| efficiency.
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| As someone with ADHD, that's a lot to ask. However, in my
| opinion what we really need is a common standard for banks to
| handle recurring payments for subscriptions. Asking me to
| review every single thing on every account is a ton to ask,
| but it would be a lot more manageable if recurring stuff had
| its own section and that I could cancel stuff from my bank
| app directly.
|
| Sure there are a lot of complexities, but it's not that
| horrendous as someone who literally worked on recurring
| payments for a bank. You just simplify things by making it a
| pull system. A recurring payment is just authorization from
| the bank to withdraw up to X dollars every Y days/months/year
| (you want a design like this to avoid dealing with holidays
| and weekends on the bank side which vary for every country).
| madars wrote:
| >This line of reasoning reminds me of the petulant discussion
| revolving around overdraft fees... as-if it's difficult to
| spend 3 seconds tapping a button in your banking app.
|
| Not sure which discussions you call "petulant" but banks
| high-to-low ordering payments is predatory against people who
| lack liquidity. (Simple example: if you have $500 in your
| account, and the following transactions happen in sequence in
| a day: a +$200 deposit and a -$600 rent deduction, some banks
| will specifically override chronological order and process
| -$600 first so that you get an overdraft charge, despite
| having positive balance all the way when processing
| chronologically.) This is might not be a common problem for a
| lot of users of this website (though see a sibling comment
| re: ADHD), but the problem is real, not "petulance".
| https://www.nber.org/digest/202103/bank-ordering-debit-
| charg...
|
| Of course this only happens to _you and me_ , whereas banks
| can and do use daylight overdraft and can easily go billions
| in overdraft:
| https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/psr_dlod.htm
| (There is a 50 basis points charge for uncollateralized
| overdrafts (and none for collaterized) but that is less
| meaningful in relative terms than $30 charge for people in
| above scenarios.)
| jjav wrote:
| > Not sure which discussions you call "petulant" but banks
| high-to-low ordering payments is predatory against people
| who lack liquidity.
|
| Indeed, and as the article also mentions, banks will
| intentionally maximize the number of overdraft fees by
| reordering transactions in a way that causes most pain.
| This should not be legal.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > People need to have personal responsibility.
|
| Do people need to have personal responsibility when they
| operate a business? Why is responsibility any less there?
|
| I think it's irresponsible to exploit other people's mistakes
| (unless they are a competing business, and not always then
| either). It happens incidentally sometimes at minimal cost,
| but at high cost or when it can be avoided, it's the
| businessperson's responsibility to not do it.
|
| Every one makes mistakes; you too. Forgive us our
| tresspasses, as we forgive those who tresspass ...
| Rayhem wrote:
| You can advocate for more personal responsibility _and also_
| advocate for businesses to behave in the interests of
| individual human beings. They 're not mutually exclusive.
| Just because I don't want a business to extort every last
| cent from me they can doesn't mean I want to absolve myself
| of all responsibility to everything ever.
|
| > Review your bank/credit accounts
|
| I mean, shouldn't it be your responsibility to know exactly
| how much money you've made and spent? Why should a bank
| provide this information for you? Does this not serve as yet
| another lessening of personal accountability (pun
| *absolutely* intended)?
| lazide wrote:
| What kind of idiot doesn't take (legal) free money?
| behringer wrote:
| This with dignity?
|
| Or do you also ask for handouts everywhere you go?
| lazide wrote:
| Taking free money isn't asking for handouts.
|
| Taking free money is (in this case) someone you know
| handing you $100 and saying 'merry Christmas' or whatever.
|
| Sure, you could throw it on the ground and say 'f you'.
|
| But these are existing customers who already give you money
| and are presumably happy with your service.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > presumably happy with your service
|
| The OP is about billions being spent by people who are
| not happy but haven't unsubscribed, so that seems like a
| bad presumption.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Taking all legal free money is wise, or even just non-
| idiotic?
| lazide wrote:
| If someone you know (a customer, in this case, with an
| existing relationship) wants to keep paying you, why go out
| of your way to say no?
|
| unless there is a specific reason you think they screwed up
| - like they say they want to cancel, but hit the wrong
| button or something.
|
| Or you know they're dead and can't cancel.
|
| Otherwise it just inconveniences them if they want it,
| since you cancelled it out from under them.
|
| Bad business, and probably rude unless there is a concrete
| reason you have to believe otherwise.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > If someone you know (a customer, in this case, with an
| existing relationship) wants to keep paying you, why go
| out of your way to say no?
|
| Because I don't want to take people's money that I
| haven't earned. Why do I want to scam people? Blaming
| them doesn't make it less of a scam.
|
| > unless there is a concrete reason you have to believe
| otherwise
|
| Here we agree. You need a concrete reason. For example,
| if your service streams movies and they haven't streamed
| one in a year, that might be a concrete reason. Sometimes
| it's ambiguous, and then send them an email.
| lumb63 wrote:
| A subscription service is an agreement between a consumer and a
| business, where the consumer agrees to provide money in
| exchange for access to some service. That service might be
| something that they regularly receive, e.g. meal kits, or it
| might be something that they can choose to access, e.g.
| Spotify. In the former case, where there is a definite
| agreement that some item will be delivered, I agree with you;
| not providing that is fraudulent. It looks like you're talking
| about the latter case, though, and I starkly disagree there.
|
| First, it is not the responsibility of the business to ensure
| people use the product that the business sold them. Why should
| it be? This standard doesn't exist for companies providing
| physical products. Someone could order a meal kit subscription,
| and after receiving the food every week, they could choose to
| throw it straight in the trash. The company shouldn't offer
| someone a refund because they chose to throw away the food they
| sent. The same principle applies for digital subscriptions -
| the subscriber is choosing to throw away access to whatever
| service the business provides.
|
| Second, I think it's worth pointing out that the principle
| underlying your argument, that it is the responsibility of the
| payee to ensure the payer gets what they pay for, logically
| contradicts salaried or waged work. The principle you've
| implied is consistent with all services being paid for
| piecemeal, since if nothing is produced, nothing was received.
| This implies cashiers should be paid per transaction, chefs
| should be paid per meal, baristas should be paid per cup, etc.
| Maybe you do think that - I can't possibly know. However, I
| doubt you would support a minimum-wage worker having to return
| a day's pay to their employer if no customers showed up that
| day. I think that's silly, because in the absence of active
| demand, the employee is still providing a service: their
| presence, and thus the ability to fulfill transactions if
| requested.
|
| I also think what you're saying not only absolves consumers of
| their responsibility, but also strips from them any agency in
| the matter. This is not a problem requiring collective action,
| like climate change. This is a problem where the individual's
| actions are 100% capable of resolving it. In a world where lots
| of issues are out of the individual's control, why not empower
| people to control what they can? Cancelling unwanted
| subscriptions is a simple and effective way to avoid unwanted
| subscription fees, and is available to every subscription-
| holder. Arguing that businesses should resolve, to their own
| detriment, a problem that consumers create, and can easily
| resolve, doesn't make any sense to me.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Taken to a logical extreme, it might mean all that. That
| discussion is interesting philosophically (I mean that
| sincerely), but in this case I'm just speaking practically,
| and in that context it's easy to see the solutions IMHO.
| cryptozeus wrote:
| What would you want business to do ? See that customer is not
| active then go ahead and remove their subscription?? Lmao then
| you will have customers asking why did you stop my account.
| Clearly you have not faced customers before.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| OP doesn't say remove subscription, just charge $0 for months
| where users don't use the service.
| roland35 wrote:
| Aren't they just providing access to their service? Different
| companies provide different billing methods and that's fine!
|
| For example you could pay $20/month for ChatGPT and use it as
| much or little as you like, or pay $/per API call... But not
| every company needs to offer both.
| mtmail wrote:
| Yes, sometimes you purchase capacity to be able to use
| something. The provider has to reserve that capacity.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "It should be chame that also falls on them, but somehow we
| give businesses a pass."
|
| I have always seen the push for "subscriptions" as a business
| model by so-called "tech" companies with suspcicion. Looks like
| it was warranted.
|
| Forgetting to cancel is part of the scheme. A friend of mine
| once worked briefly for a direct marketing company many, many
| years ago, pre-www. He said they knew a certain percentage
| would forget to cancel. They banked on it.
|
| This is not something new.
| JohnFen wrote:
| One of the reasons why I avoid subscriptions to anything if at
| all possible is to avoid this. More than a couple and the cost of
| having to keep track of them exceeds any value of having them.
| olliej wrote:
| s/forget to cancel/unable to cancel/
| lostmsu wrote:
| Reminded me to cancel my Disney+ I got for Loki S2
| (disappointing)
| bogota wrote:
| This is why pretty much everything i subscribe to is through
| apple. Walled garden and all that but i subscribe and instantly
| cancel all but a few things and it makes sure im not throwing
| money away on services i only use for a week or two
| weinzierl wrote:
| The irony is that Americans are probably spending a lot because
| they forgot to cancel their WSJ subscription;-)
|
| When I canceled mine a couple of years ago I think it could only
| be done by phone, which already is a hurdle. To be fair to WSJ,
| it was smooth sailing from there and they did not bother me or
| try to trick me to renew it, in or after the phone call.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| This sort of thing exists in many areas, not just subscriptions.
|
| Starbucks has over $1.5B (something like 17% of its free cash,
| don't quote me though) in the form of spare change lingering on
| Starbucks Cards. It fundamentally affects their financials, but
| is also perceived as just spare change slipping into the couch.
| fullshark wrote:
| This requires government regulation. Sorry but the free market
| incentivizes bad behavior in this instance. If it means that the
| price of a subscription will go up cause they can no longer
| extract payments from the lazy/forgetful then so be it.
| daxfohl wrote:
| Just did this with Xfinity an hour ago.
|
| I didn't even _forget_, per se: been trying to cancel online for
| months. It says they'll call you, then they never do, and _then_
| I forget until I see the next billing statement. Finally went
| into the store this morning, but without any proof of previous
| attempts on hand, all they could do was cancel as of today.
|
| Frankly, they couldn't even give me a paper confirmation, and
| they say the email confirmation will come in a day or two, so
| this probably isn't even over yet.
|
| I actually did get a screenshot of the most recent attempt, but
| everyone involved knows I'm probably not going to find it worth
| my time to fight it. They win.
| izzydata wrote:
| Sounds like a multi-million dollar business opportunity for a
| relatively cheap monthly service that automatically cancels
| services you don't use.
| wjnc wrote:
| This is my dream. A company in between me and all kinds of
| service providers (energy, insurance, internet, mobile, let's
| go crazy and add: mortgage, mobility) and just regularly
| switches me to the best offer while I retain service. They
| could get probably get away with a 10% fee and still deliver,
| because they can reverse auction their portfolio and get
| massively better deals than usually available. They can do KYC
| and vouch for my credit rating, keep my PII safer while putting
| my saved money to work in an investment account while
| bargaining for the lowest costs. Worth billions. We could then
| use those billions to buy stakes in the firms that give us
| shitty service to force them to put the customer first.
| izzydata wrote:
| Sounds pretty awesome albeit vastly more complicated than
| what I had imagined. The idea of customers collective
| bargaining to force competition is neat.
| blamazon wrote:
| It's not quite the same pitch, but I use privacy.com to set up
| a unique virtual card for every subscription I sign up for -
| that way, all in one dashboard and can stop them on demand. I
| also set the spend limit just above the current price so if
| there's a price hike it denies the transaction.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| podcasts advertise this to me all of the time. I think it's
| called rocketmoney or zenwallet or something along those lines
| Klonoar wrote:
| You mean the company listed in TFA, that was formerly called
| TrueBill before Rocket bought them for $1B a few years back? ;P
| paxys wrote:
| It's bizarre to me just how many people in this country (
| _especially_ the ones who can least afford it) simply do not take
| charge of their financial health. Even in this very thread you
| can see all kinds of excuses ( "it's too hard to log in and check
| credit card statements every month", "they make you call or chat
| to cancel so I don't bother", "they should cancel subscriptions
| automatically if you don't use them", "it's the government's
| fault").
|
| This discussion is about subscriptions but the general idea
| applies to so much more - basic budgeting, retirement savings,
| not paying random fees, not paying interest, moving spare money
| to investment accounts every month, rebalancing your investments
| every quarter, negotiating rents, negotiating your salary.
|
| Ultimately it is your money and your problem. No one is looking
| out for you. You can either endlessly complain about it or build
| some good habits. 30 minutes of effort once a month to go over
| bills and budgets is hardly the end of the world.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| People tend to act shocked when I tell them my finance app
| requires me to enter transactions manually and doesn't
| magically categorize everything.
|
| You spend a third of your life working for that money, surely
| you spend 5 minutes at most tracking how you spend it.
| drawnwren wrote:
| which finance app do you recommend?
| maleldil wrote:
| YNAB is pretty good. I like their zero-based budget system.
| tunesmith wrote:
| I'm guilty of being averse to this too, even though I
| intellectually know that if I accept manually entering
| transactions, then there are so many more options I can
| choose for tracking finances. As it is, I'm locked into a
| Banktivity subscription fee...
|
| I think part of it is that it is just so hard to centralize
| all finances through just one bank. The best bank for
| retirement doesn't support business credit cards; the best
| credit cards are with completely different companies, etc.
| Monthly finances are a huge hassle as it is.
| jjav wrote:
| > I think part of it is that it is just so hard to
| centralize all finances through just one bank.
|
| I always advice against single points of failure (whether
| software, security, or finance). Do the opposite, pick the
| best for each and intentionally avoid overlap.
|
| I have credit cards from every major bank but I don't have
| anything else at those banks. My accounts with money in
| them are in other institutions where I don't have cards or
| anything else. My mortgage is with a bank where I have
| nothing else with them, and so on.
|
| Decentralize, avoid too many eggs in any one basket.
| tdeck wrote:
| I use an app like this as well. Was working great until I
| moved in with someone and it became more time consuming to
| look over line items and split all the restaurant / grocery
| bills rather than just entering the total. Now I have a bowl
| full of receipts to go through and the balance is usually not
| up to date :/.
| rockooooo wrote:
| sure, but when there's a dozen apps that will do it
| automatically, why?
| jjeaff wrote:
| if the app automatically categorizes things, you don't ever
| have to look at it. doing it yourself requires that you
| review every transaction individually.
| woobar wrote:
| Categorization and review are two different processes.
| The app I use will download and categorize, but I still
| have to review/accept each transaction. What is the
| benefit of manual entry in this case?
| gardenhedge wrote:
| Why are both of you not naming the apps you use?
| antisthenes wrote:
| My credit card statement already automatically
| categorizes things.
|
| I don't know what's the point of using a 3rd party app
| for this, unless you feel very generous about providing
| your data for someone to sell.
|
| I also don't know what's the point of reviewing
| transactions individually. If I pay something monthly
| (e.g. internet/car insurance/utility bills), I'm not
| going to look at it every month. I might check it at the
| end of the year to see if there are any 10x anomalies,
| but that's it.
|
| I'm also not going to check transactions under $20,
| unless there are hundreds of them that are unexpected.
|
| Although I do feel sorry for buyers who spend $1000+
| every month on impulse shopping, but those are also the
| kind of people to never check their financial health
| anyway.
| marssaxman wrote:
| What value do you feel that you gain from all that
| categorization effort?
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| Is it really that shocking? People pay a lot for convenience.
| Not putting effort into managing money is another act of
| convenience that comes with a cost.
| paxys wrote:
| Hiring a money manager would be the convenience here, but
| that's not what is happening.
| grotorea wrote:
| It may be simply a case of the people who most need this stuff
| are the most likely to lack either or both mental energy or the
| requisite knowledge.
|
| And frankly, I don't see why the government shouldn't mandate
| making it easy to unsubscribe.
| rectang wrote:
| The rapacious corporations agree with you -- no matter how
| deceptive or even illegal their practices are, no matter how
| much R&D money is brought to bear in designing innovative user
| interfaces and bureaucratic frameworks which systematically
| exploit human weaknesses (particularly those of vulnerable
| populations such as less-tech-savvy elders) to bleed the
| populace dry... it's all the fault of the individual victims
| who are "allowing" themselves to be ripped off, one-by-one.
| gedy wrote:
| I think you are misrepresenting OPs point. We all know many
| people who are extremely sloppy with their personal finances,
| and sign up for things they can't afford, debt they are
| unlikely to pay back, etc.
|
| Am I sad for companies who take in these people as customers?
| No, but let's not canonize people who are reckless with their
| spending, even when warned.
| rectang wrote:
| Let's not pretend that the only people getting ripped off
| are those who are 100% irresponsible and entirely devoid of
| any redeeming financial virtue.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Of course in any population there will be a long tail of
| people who are bad at finances, for example leasing cars
| they can't afford or using buy now pay later plans for
| clothes they don't need.
|
| That's not what this is about though. In those situations,
| the person is consciously choosing a bad option. However
| this is materially different, because with auto-pay people
| are being charged without their knowledge. The first
| situation involves making a bad choice, but this is being
| unaware of a bad thing, which companies are exploiting.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > We all know many people who are extremely sloppy with
| their personal finances, and sign up for things they can't
| afford, debt they are unlikely to pay back, etc.
|
| You know I have heard this my entire life, and I have yet
| to actually meet any of these people. The people I have met
| though fall into one or more of a number of categories:
|
| - People uneducated in finance, usually lower class: You
| can say things like "well of course credit cards charge
| interest" but I was never taught that in school. I learned
| it from my mother, who is an accountant. She also taught me
| how to do things like a proper budget, balance a checkbook,
| diligent record-keeping on expenditures, and how to file my
| taxes. I was never offered this knowledge in schooling. The
| gap between how many, I believe well intention-ed and well
| educated people have between what is "common sense"
| financial knowledge and what is known by common people, can
| be the grand fucking canyon.
|
| - Despite the above, I have also never in my life met a
| person who believed a credit card was free money. Everyone
| knew they had to pay it back, even if they didn't
| understand interest and why interest was about to ruin
| their credit score.
|
| - Additionally, I have never met a person who signed up for
| things they couldn't afford for the hell of it. I met a few
| people who were _sold_ mortgages they couldn 't afford, by
| representatives of financial institutions. I've also met
| people who borrowed money from Payday loan stores because
| their cars were broken and they could not earn money until
| that was solved, and they lacked the money to accomplish
| that.
|
| - I've also met people who, before they were legally
| allowed to DRINK, were allowed to sign on the dotted line
| for six figures of educational funding, with no
| demonstration of understanding how the critical above
| concepts worked, so they could know what they would
| eventually pay, nor any demonstration of how they would
| earn enough of a living afterwards to pay it off, which is
| just odd to me? Like, a bank won't loan you $500k to buy a
| house that's only worth $100k, so why will they loan you
| $150k to get a degree in underwater basket weaving?
|
| - Lastly, I've also met people who struggle with things
| like depression, addiction, attention issues, all manner of
| ailments that either stem from or are made worse by a lack
| of dopamine in their brains, which makes them impulsive and
| possibly reckless depending on the day, and I have seen
| them interacting with products that are _clearly,
| blatantly,_ preying on their inability to say no
| effectively so that they will say yes. And once they say
| yes enough times, their credit cards are maxed out, and
| they 're in the poorhouse for no other reason than being
| vulnerable to manipulation.
|
| And like, all of that aside, even if you meet NONE of those
| categories, I still, frankly, believe it's not only
| possible but the only ethical response to all of this is:
| we should have a society that leaves enough room for people
| to fuck up occasionally without ruining their goddamn
| lives. I don't know exactly how we go about that, in
| finance especially this is a tricky thing, but at the same
| time, I simply don't believe that a lifetime of wage-slave-
| serfdom, or perhaps worse, freezing to death on the street,
| is an acceptable punishment for you making a bad financial
| decision at some point in your life. That does not make
| sense to me.
| brvsft wrote:
| > And like, all of that aside, even if you meet NONE of
| those categories, I still, frankly, believe it's not only
| possible but the only ethical response to all of this is:
| we should have a society that leaves enough room for
| people to fuck up occasionally without ruining their
| goddamn lives.
|
| At this point, I don't understand what the fuck you
| people are talking about. This is an article about people
| paying for subscriptions they don't use, not people
| _ruining their goddamn lives_. The hyperbole is
| extensive, is this article posted to some Socialist
| Discord so everyone can raid the comments? Why is this
| level of bad faith discussion occurring?
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| The topic of the original post is an article about that.
| The GP comment we're all replying to took that as a
| direction to discuss how many people do not take care of
| their finances, and how you, as an individual, are on
| your own. Several comments in reply to that person went
| on to discuss how "take care of your financial health" is
| only really an applicable statement when the person in
| question is at least somewhat educated in finance: that
| tons of people reach adulthood without that knowledge or
| those skills. And, that situation is complicated still
| more by the fact that many businesses, quite
| intentionally, are preying on both that lack of knowledge
| in general, and on people at large using dark patterns to
| obfuscate or make canceling subscriptions difficult.
| Then, off of that, someone else commented saying that
| they felt a reply was misrepresenting what was said by
| another, stating that "we all know people who are sloppy
| with their finances", which is, IMO, a clear and standard
| example of the appeal to common belief fallacy. To which
| I challenged, citing numerous experiences to the contrary
| I have had, and my utter lack of experiences to this
| common knowledge I have been told is common knowledge:
| that people, by and large are poor because they fail at
| money management, and not, which is my contention, that
| the majority of that time they are not poor because of
| bad money management, but they are poor because they are
| poor and are being taken advantage of. This is not
| hyperbole, this is just an evolving discussion. If you
| don't like the direction it's taking, you're free to not
| participate.
| wnc3141 wrote:
| My rule of thumb looking at any problem has evolved to: it
| it's one person, blame them. If it's happening to swaths of
| the population, scrutinize the system they operate in.
| Mistakes can only be treated entirely as such if most other
| people don't fall for them. Otherwise it's a systemic
| issue.
| brvsft wrote:
| These comments are so blatantly absurd considering in all the
| cases we're talking about, the user signed up for the service
| initially. Even if it's a trial, the user is forced to make
| it abundantly recognized that they will be charged money when
| the trial is over because they are forced to input credit
| card information or authorize use of Apple Pay or some other
| similar service to enter the trial.
|
| I can understand suggesting that services like this,
| especially when using tech like Apple Pay, have made it too
| easy to 'check out' through a trial process, but the language
| is still over-the-top since the user is still clearly
| considering the product as potentially useful to go through
| the effort of signing up for a trial or an actual sub. (And
| on the flipside, Apple Pay, e.g., makes it easy to see all
| subs in one place and cancel them in one place, so it has
| that going for it.)
|
| And of course, what illegal practices are you talking about?
| I'm going to guess most people here aren't blaming the victim
| if a practice is actually illegal. But I see you're being
| hyperbolic so maybe I shouldn't bother.
| rectang wrote:
| The big change between the subscriptions of yore, e.g.
| magazine subscriptions in the days before the internet, and
| the subscriptions of today, is that payments used to be
| push and now they are pull. The magazine used to have to
| beg and plead with you to send them a check, but now
| vendors can set up an automatic debit continuing into
| perpetuity.
|
| The regulatory environment has not caught up (although the
| article explains how it's starting to). It turns out that
| recurring pull payments tend not to be cancelled, resulting
| in a system where massive overpayments for actual services
| consumed are the norm. This is not economic efficiency
| leading to useful consumer innovation, it's rewarding the
| players who lodge the darkest dark patterns. Occasionally
| that includes, as described elsethread, the illegal
| practice of "just straight-up not honoring the 300 page
| contracts that they had written" -- although unethical
| practices such as making it deceptively difficult to cancel
| are presumably more common than outright lawbreaking.
| unglaublich wrote:
| > (especially the ones who can least afford it)
|
| There's a correlation between financial illiteracy and
| acquiring cripling debt.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Some of these are valid issues though. I'd consider myself in
| top 1% when it comes to financial health and I still pay for
| stuff I forgot to cancel. Some of the reasons:
|
| > They make you call between 9 am and 5 pm, and hold for hours
| to cancel, sometimes even disconnect forcing you to start over,
| while not offering a callback option. Sometimes there are weeks
| I absolutely cannot afford to do this because of work.
|
| > You buy something, and they tag a "3-4 months free" of
| another service, which you can't opt out of even if you want
| to, and then suddenly charge you that extra money on the 5th
| month. You obviously cancel it, but you still overpaid for a
| month.
|
| > Services that charge you once a year. You forgot to cancel
| the Xbox subscription because you bought a PS5, got charged a
| year later. Now you cancel it, but you paid for the year.
|
| > Services that make you use or forgo credits that you already
| paid for if you cancel. (Audible) You want to cancel, but you
| put it off for another month because now, you need to figure
| out 5 ebooks to buy. Next month, you end up in the same
| situation and now you need to figure out 6 ebooks to buy.
|
| The point being, you could check all your statements weekly,
| and still end up spending money on something you forgot about.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _They make you call between 9 am and 5 pm_
|
| This is customer service. A written notice of termination
| works for any consumer contract.
|
| > _but you paid for the year_
|
| Unpay for it. This is the utility of credit cards.
| rectang wrote:
| > _Unpay for it. This is the utility of credit cards._
|
| That's a facile answer. You're extremely well educated on
| this matter and know full well the downsides of "unpaying".
|
| EDIT: see sibling comment from "notaustinpowers" for an
| explanation of the downsides (thanks!).
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39060260
| boredtofears wrote:
| What are the downsides of disputing a charge?
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| If you unpay for, say, YouTube, I'm pretty sure Google
| will straight up delete you.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| "Most places have segments in their contract that state
| if you do a chargeback or block a payment, they will
| terminate your account, and payment providers can block
| that card from being used on their service in the
| future." Also, depending on the agreement, you can be
| sent to collections (gym memberships are notorious for
| this).
|
| The chargeback doesn't supersede the vendor's control of
| access to the service or potential legal/debt
| obligations.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39060260
| jjav wrote:
| > Most places have segments in their contract that state
| if you do a chargeback or block a payment, they will
| terminate your account,
|
| When terminating my account is exactly what I want,
| that's totally fine.
|
| This does highlight yet another problem with
| consolidating to huge companies. You'll never be able to
| charge back to a behemot like amazon or google, they'll
| just erase you off large parts of the internet which
| would be problematic.
|
| But with smaller vendors that you are trying to get rid
| of and never want anything to do with them again, it
| works wonderfully.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| Use a temporary credit card number that's only authorized
| for one payment. When it doesn't work the second year,
| they'll let you know you need to pay.
|
| Sign up and immediately cancel/turn off billing, so you
| aren't charged again next year (again, they'll send you a
| bunch of notices ahead of the end of your service).
|
| Put a calendar reminder in for 11.5 months out from when
| you sign up.
|
| In Slack, /remind me in 11.5 months to cancel X service.
| rectang wrote:
| My tech-hating mom is currently spending hours, maybe
| even days setting up billpay through her bank so she
| doesn't have to give companies her credit card info for
| subscriptions. She's been burned too many times trying
| and failing to cancel subscriptions.
|
| But reading suggestions like yours, apparently it's all
| on people like my poor mom to outwit corporations with
| multi-million-dollar budgets dedicated to screwing her
| over. (And yes I'm helping, but precious few tech-noob
| elders have an engineer in the family.)
| jjav wrote:
| > My tech-hating mom is currently spending hours, maybe
| even days setting up billpay through her bank so she
| doesn't have to give companies her credit card info for
| subscriptions. She's been burned too many times trying
| and failing to cancel subscriptions.
|
| Why? That's much worse. If anything is going to do a
| recurring charge to me, I want it to go through a credit
| card which offers a layer of indirection.
|
| I never authorize automatic billing directly to a bank
| account, then the money is truly gone. With a credit card
| I can always protest the charge and have had to do this
| with particularly difficult businesses a few times.
| rectang wrote:
| > _Why? That 's much worse._
|
| Congratulations, HNer -- you're more tech savvy than my
| mom.
|
| Perhaps you're volunteering to help vulnerable seniors
| like her navigate the Hobbesian nightmare of
| subscriptions?
|
| I applaud your initiative, but if you're new to this, let
| me caution you: they don't always understand or follow
| the advice you give them precisely. Even if they are
| trying their best.
| jjav wrote:
| Funny, I guess it can be difficult. I do manage all the
| accounts and finances for a >>90yr old family member, but
| it is easier because I manage all of it.
| rx_tx wrote:
| would a service like privacy[dot]com which generates
| custom one-off credit card numbers with custom spend
| limits be useful? (Not affiliated, I just use them from
| time-to-time exactly for that purpose)
| davchana wrote:
| Privacy.com is awful. You forgo the credit card
| protections, they need full access to a checking account,
| you can't do chargebacks, you lose any cashback methods.
|
| Use a virtual card from your credit card Many banks offer
| these now a these days (Capital one does, with all cards,
| in app or in browser, no need for extension).
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Critical HN energy
| Andrex wrote:
| So easy a toddler (with three PhDs) could do it!
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Use a temporary credit card number that 's only
| authorized for one payment_
|
| These get sold to a collections company. Invalid payment
| doesn't invalidate the contract.
| notaustinpowers wrote:
| > This is a customer service. A written notice of
| termination works for any consumer contract.
|
| Not entirely. Most places don't accept cancellations over
| email, or require certified mail for cancellations, which
| just means now you have to go to the post office between
| 9-5.
|
| > Unpay for it. This is the utility of credit cards.
|
| Most places have segments in their contract that state if
| you do a chargeback or block a payment, they will terminate
| your account, and payment providers can block that card
| from being used on their service in the future.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Not only can they terminate your account and potentially
| block that card in the future across other services using
| the same payment provider, more expensive subscriptions
| like a gym WILL continue accruing a bill for you and will
| send it to collections which hurts your credit score.
| bluGill wrote:
| You can dispute that with the credit services though.
| Which probably won't get you anywhere but it is worth
| doing.
|
| Make sure you give them negative feedback with the BBB if
| canceling is too hard.
|
| Though the business model of most gyms (except the
| expensive ones) is to get you to enroll and then not
| come, so they won't care.
| olyjohn wrote:
| If it won't get you anywhere... then how is it worth
| doing? What a waste of time.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Most places don 't accept cancellations over email, or
| require certified mail for cancellations_
|
| E-mail yes. But I've never seen a letter mailed fail.
| Especially if you Cc your state's consumer protection
| regulator.
|
| > _if you do a chargeback or block a payment, they will
| terminate your account_
|
| Wait, what are we trying to do?
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| > This is customer service. A written notice of termination
| works for any consumer contract.
|
| Next time you're in a well trafficked area, ask 20 people
| if they know they can do this.
| teg4n_ wrote:
| Also who would you even send it to? How do you guarantee
| they receive it? If you do certified mail that is a cost
| and another thing to take up your time.
| jjav wrote:
| True, although I'd rather pay the few dollars for that
| and the 10 minutes in the post office, than spend endless
| hours on hold just to be hung up on and start again.
| teg4n_ wrote:
| That's assuming the letter even works in having the
| subscription cancelled. Regardless of whether or not it
| should work, I am certainly not confident such a thing
| would be handled properly. If it isn't then you are back
| to customer service or i guess hiring a lawyer.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| 10 minutes _during weekday business hours_ plus 30 for
| commute and 20 minutes of standing in line if you go at
| noon. Also, the discoverability of this workflow is
| complete dogshit.
|
| None of this is a problem for me, but I fully understand
| why dishonest businessfolk _love_ to exploit the hell out
| of these "tiny conditions" and then turn around and
| pretend they don't understand why they are a big deal.
| jjav wrote:
| > Also, the discoverability of this workflow is complete
| dogshit.
|
| Yes, the correct solution is certainly to pass laws that
| force companies to enable easy and quick unsubscribe
| process.
|
| Just commenting on that between the two bad choices of
| hours and hours on hold, or 10 minutes in the post
| office, I'll take the latter.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| There ought to be some legislation to modify the credit
| card system such that all your recurring subscriptions are
| managed through your payment provider (say credit card web
| portal) so you can see a list and cancel them with one
| click.
| njarboe wrote:
| I have one credit card I only use for recurring charges.
| That helps me easily see how much I spend each month and
| notice when yearly charges happen, etc. Some services
| will even rebate if you cancel soon after the yearly
| charge happens.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Most of them will, particularly the sketchier ones like
| online dating sites.
|
| It is worth it to them to let you cancel a subscription
| rather than have to deal with chargebacks, lawsuits, bad
| publicity, etc.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Two of those can be fixed with a simple calendar entry. We do
| that with subscriptions but also with things like AirBNB
| bookings where you can cancel up to x weeks in advance.
| slumberlust wrote:
| That's cool that you've found a system that works to avoid
| the abuse, but it's still abusive.
| brvsft wrote:
| Which part is abusive? I might view that last item as a
| sort of dark pattern (exploiting the sunk cost fallacy),
| but I still fail to see how it's abusive. If you're not
| using the service, cancel your subscription? Is
| everything you don't like even slightly now qualified as
| _ABUSE_?
| bobthepanda wrote:
| The hostile "you must call into an understaffed call
| center and hold for several hours" is definitely abusive.
| I believe NYT was particularly bad about this in the
| past.
| olyjohn wrote:
| You acknowledge it's a dark pattern, but then excuse it.
| Dark patterns are 100% abuse.
| tomcar288 wrote:
| my solution to this is to not have any subscriptions except
| for property taxes, garbage, utilities, insurance and phone
| plan. and I absolutely avoid 30 day free trials (if they ask
| for credit card info) like the plague. the moment I see a
| credit card number entry field, I close the browser tab
| immediately.
|
| but, I'd like to know, which companies have onerous
| cancellation policies?
| dataangel wrote:
| > which companies have onerous cancellation policies?
|
| gyms
| EwanG wrote:
| Bloomberg - Had a subscription and saw the renewal coming
| up. Decided to cancel, but you can't do it yourself - you
| have to go through their service desk and of course they
| try five ways from Sunday to get you to reup with a cheaper
| plan (that then jumps to the full price after 1 to 3
| months).
|
| Spectrum (previously Time Warner Cable) - To cancel you
| need your account number (both the TW and the Spectrum ones
| for folks who were converted) and your PIN for each - which
| you likely setup only once and may well not have realized
| you needed since it's only for starting service and
| cancelling. Don't have them? You can't cancel. Let me
| emphasize that again, if you don't give them the right
| number they will continue to charge you until your credit
| card expires, and then send you to collections. I am
| fastidious about account info and had mine, but some of my
| neighbors were less so.
|
| Were you looking for a full list (I have more) or just
| wanted a couple of examples?
| Spivak wrote:
| Most of them could be solved by our CC system putting people
| in control. Wanna cancel NYT, stop payment and let them come
| to you if they want to bother. The fact that people can just
| take money from our accounts on a whim and we have to beg
| them to get it back or stop is a ridiculous system. I would
| much rather deal with invoices.
|
| The only system where they just charge you I like is the
| usage model. I get a bill from AWS, OpenAI, and Backblaze
| every month for a few dollars but if I stop using them the
| bill drops to $0.
| Algemarin wrote:
| > This discussion is about subscriptions but the general idea
| applies to so much more - basic budgeting, retirement savings,
| not paying random fees, not paying interest, moving spare money
| to investment accounts every month, rebalancing your
| investments every quarter, negotiating rents, negotiating your
| salary.
|
| I think it's one of the major failures of the education system.
| Why is there no class in school which covers taxes, savings,
| budgeting, etc? People are seemingly just expected to know this
| on their own.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| Most subjects taught in K-12 tend to be ancient: language,
| math, history, science, music, etc. with occasional modern
| electives.
|
| Obviously personal finance is also ancient on some level, but
| I wonder how long it's actually been so complicated and
| critical as to warrant consideration for being taught in
| school. I'm no expert, but I think the complexities like
| payment cards, insanely complex tax code, etc. are quite
| modern. On the other hand, the same could be said for
| driver's ed which is pretty common.
| JohnFen wrote:
| When I was in grade school (a very long time ago), personal
| finance was a huge focus. It was the main thing you learned
| in Home Economics class. When my kids were in grade school,
| it was basically not taught at all. Home Ec was more about
| sewing and cooking than about, you know, economics.
|
| I don't know when that change happened, but it's to the
| detriment of everyone.
| dvdkon wrote:
| Would the kinds of people who have trouble budgeting and
| managing their investments be any better at it if the
| technique was taught at school? Judging from my own
| experience, I'd say willpower is the bigger barrier.
| Thankfully I'm not in a situation where I'd need to carefully
| watch my daily expenses (being semi-concious of them works
| well for me), but if I had to, I'd have to force myself.
| Maybe that's too much for some.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > managing their investments
|
| Bold of you to assume that these people have investments at
| all.
| bluGill wrote:
| IF you don't know the basics of math you won't figure out
| personal finance. If you do know math you can figure it out -
| that isn't saying you will, but you can.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > Ultimately it is your money and your problem. No one is
| looking out for you.
|
| This is true, but it doesn't mean that collective solutions
| cannot exist or should not be desired.
| vdaea wrote:
| >It's bizarre to me just how many people in this country
| (especially the ones who can least afford it) simply do not
| take charge of their financial health.
|
| I've seen it first-hand how those with the biggest financial
| problems earn as much money as anybody else, but they simply
| can't handle it. And the rest of us are supposed to bail them
| out of course.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| While that's true, there are multi-billion dollar industries
| built around exploiting financial ignorance. Payday loan
| companies and gambling are top of mind for me here. Who are
| we really bailing out, the financially unhealthy or the
| corporate parasites?
| tehjoker wrote:
| Well that's a dismal way to look at it. Regulations should be
| in place to prevent these kinds of business practices. For
| example, if a user doesn't use a service, perhaps they should
| get a refund for those months.
| paxys wrote:
| This is exactly the problem I am talking about. Why is the
| first instinct to always externalize blame? Why is big
| government the default solution to everything? How about - if
| you are not getting value out of a subscription (that _you_
| signed up for), go and cancel it. And if you choose not to,
| don 't blame the rest of the world for your money problems.
| dvdkon wrote:
| Bluntly, we live with individuals who just suck at finance
| (this extends to other now-necessary skills too). I want to
| live in a world where they aren't constantly taken
| advantage of. Consider it a mental disorder if you need to;
| we don't have to punish people for being dumb.
|
| Besides, regulation of this kind (cancelling subscription)
| benefits everyone but certain companies. I don't want to
| waste my time due to someone's misguided free market
| ideology. Even if navigating endless bureaucracy _does_
| make me feel smart.
|
| That said, I hate the tendency of regulators to outright
| ban certain activities. Everyone should be free to throw
| their money away (by e.g. making risky investments), after
| signing a lot of very scary forms and showing that they
| really mean it.
| paxys wrote:
| If I watch 1 hour of Netflix a month and you watch 300
| hundred hours a month, should the government mandate that
| Netflix charge you 300x more than me? If not, why should
| the person who watches 0 hours be treated any
| differently? Ultimately Netflix is creating the plan and
| publishing its details, and we are all opting into it
| willingly. Whether we get value from it or not is for us
| to decide, not the government.
| dvdkon wrote:
| Because a person who doesn't watch Netflix for a month
| gets no value from their money, so not charging them is a
| clear win with no downsides.
|
| Netflix doesn't get as much money, but since they didn't
| provide any service, I fail to see why that's a problem.
|
| The only reasonable price for 0 work is 0EUR. For
| anything more it gets complicated.
| nightski wrote:
| That's not entirely true though. Netflix had to be
| prepared to provide that service. Meaning they needed to
| be able to have the capacity to serve the videos if
| necessary. Some times just having that capacity has a
| cost in and of itself.
|
| Not to mention they still are producing content whether
| you watch it or not, and by subscribing you are paying
| for that content to be created.
|
| It's more extreme in other scenarios, like say hospital
| emergency rooms. But it still applies to services like
| Netflix imho.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I'm with you that someone who has been paying for a service
| despite not using it shouldn't necessarily be entitled for
| a refund.
|
| That said, I _wholeheartedly_ believe that there should be
| a legal requirement for any subscription to be as easy to
| cancel as it is to sign up. Gym memberships are notoriously
| for being criminally difficult to cancel. It 's beyond
| ludicrous that I can sign up for a gym online or at my
| local gym, but can't cancel the same way. Nope, I have to
| pick up a form (which only the manager can give you, which
| means I have to go there when he's there, and he'll be
| conveniently unavailable), fill it out, mail it, and hope
| they don't conveniently "lose" it. And even if they don't
| lose it, they'll just sit on it for 2-3 months before the
| payments stop.
| jjav wrote:
| > How about - if you are not getting value out of a
| subscription (that you signed up for), go and cancel it.
|
| That sounds sensible, but fails to acknowledge the power
| differential between a single person and a billion+ dollar
| corporation.
|
| The latter has armies of people whose sole job is to
| intentionally make it almost completely impossible to
| unsubscribe.
|
| Resolving this power imbalance is one of the useful
| properties of government. Pass laws that say it must be
| very easy to unsubscribe (some states have).
| gardenhedge wrote:
| Consumer protection laws exist for a reason
| jjulius wrote:
| >... if you are not getting value out of a subscription
| (that you signed up for), go and cancel it.
|
| You're not wrong, necessarily, but the world isn't as black
| and white as you would like it to be. There is nuance to
| things, and not every subscription is as easy to cancel as
| you seem to think it should be.
|
| I cancelled my NYT subscription about a year before
| California required them to make it a one-click process. I
| had to sit on the phone with them for 90 minutes in order
| to make it happen. Various holds, multiple reps pushing
| different "packages" for me rather than just outright
| cancelling. I literally had to argue with them in order to
| make it happen.
|
| I had the time then. I didn't mind, though I sure was
| annoyed as hell. These days, with the job I have, and my
| outside-of-work life situation being what it is, 90 minutes
| isn't exactly an easy chunk of time for me to block out
| just so I can cancel a $25/month subscription. I could end
| up finding time for it, sure, and that - to your point - is
| absolutely on me. But it's not as easy to do that now as it
| was when I'd signed up for it years back. And you know,
| deep down, just as well as I do, that shit isn't ever as
| black and white as your attitude would like it to be. You
| can call it an "excuse" all you want, but that's a
| disingenuous take.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| I interviewed a bunch of "financial hardship" people a few
| years back for an app my company was working on. The lack of
| financial knowledge was pretty disappointing to me, but the big
| thing I remember is that all the people I talked to were good
| people. They all had decent, yet low-paying jobs (nurses, care-
| givers, teaching assistants, cashiers, etc.) I was expecting a
| bunch of jerks or bungling idiots, and there was some of that:
| many people don't know how interest works on a credit card
| until it's too late, or other people are completely apathetic
| to their finances. But, honestly, the thing that stuck with me
| the most is that most of them were very _trusting_ people, and
| ultimately that 's what got them to where they are (broke).
| They trusted blindly: _" [credit card company] wouldn't double
| my interest rate just because I missed one payment."_, _" The
| guy who sold me the car seemed nice. Why would he give me a 29%
| interest rate on my car loan?"_, and _" The credit card
| companies can't do that; there's got to be laws that prohibit
| that."_ Lots of statements like that really stuck with me. I
| felt bad. It's like I wanted to give a TED Talk that would've
| lasted about 30 seconds: _" The banks and credit card companies
| are not your friend, don't trust them. Once you fall into debt
| with them, you're never gonna get out. The law offers very
| little protection for you, if any at all."_
|
| And, thankfully, the app was never released. It was basically
| just an app for pay-day loans.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Yea, most people assume the best in others I think. They
| assume others will not break the law for personal gain. In
| real life, those folks get taken advantage of. I know because
| I used to be one but now I don't trust anyone. The moral
| degradation of society isn't in the extra drugs and sex we
| have, it's in the way we accept merely to follow the letter
| of the law, and find as many loopholes as possible otherwise.
| You see that in VC funded startups constantly, in politics,
| and everywhere else.
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| It's sad but Usury/Interest is often exploiting two
| bifurcated groups of people -- those who are trusting and
| those who are desperate.
| sailfast wrote:
| Worked at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for
| awhile. We encountered a lot of these cases and there are a
| ton of dark patterns as well as just straight-up not honoring
| the 300 page contracts that they had written. For the most
| part you come to understand that people are actually trying
| really hard to get it right most of the time.
|
| The lack of knowledge is quite startling (but understandable,
| given how complex some of these things often are and how much
| time it takes to figure them out that people just don't have)
| and the pace at which it is exploited is very disappointing
| but inevitable.
| 0xEF wrote:
| Intentional Obfuscation is difficult to convey to people
| who, for example, make enough money to hire someone to do
| their taxes for them.
| hartator wrote:
| > They all had decent, yet low-paying jobs (nurses, care-
| givers, teaching assistants, cashiers, etc.) I was expecting
| a bunch of jerks or bungling idiots, and there was some of
| that > And, thankfully, the app was never released. It was
| basically just an app for pay-day loans.
|
| Maybe next time don't work for them? It's not too late to
| give money to charity though.
| lwhi wrote:
| It's not bizarre when you consider the lengths companies go to,
| to try convince those who can least afford it to make a
| purchase.
|
| The most vulnerable are used a fodder for a vast capitalist
| system.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Industrialisation means that most consumer goods are mass
| produced. That means these companies need to make their money
| from wide sales instead of tall sales. Wide as in getting as
| many individual customers as possible, instead of tall as in
| selling bespoke products for an expensive price to few
| customers.
|
| Very few people need more than one washing machine. Well off
| people already own washing machines. So if you're selling
| washing machines, you need to make a way for as many poor
| people as possible to be able to buy them, hence credit and
| split payments.
| xkfm wrote:
| A lot of it is genetic. Good luck.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientiousness You have a lot
| of it, and so do the type A personality people on this site.
| xkfm wrote:
| Low conscientiousness is linked to anti-social behavior, blue-
| collared crimes, and crimes of passion,[3] as well as
| unemployment and homelessness.[19] Low conscientiousness and
| low agreeableness taken together are also associated with
| substance use disorders.[27] People low in conscientiousness
| have difficulty saving money and their risky borrowing
| practices make them fall prey to subprime and predatory lending
| more often than conscientious people. High conscientiousness is
| associated with more careful planning of shopping trips and
| less impulse buying of unneeded items.[19] Conscientiousness is
| positively correlated with business, white-collared, and
| premeditated criminal behavior.[28]
| bjourne wrote:
| Same "advice" can be given to fatties too. Your health and your
| problem. I put advice in quotes because it doesn't work and
| isn't that easy in practice.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| That's a lovely and idealistic view of humans.
|
| Unfortunately bad actors have realized that what we actually
| are is just meat computers with unpatchable security
| vulnerabilities, so demanding that people just stop having
| problems and fit your nebulous definition of competence with
| unlimited and unwavering performance, has predictably not
| panned out.
|
| What is the more moral solution then? Recognizing and placing
| systematic limits on exploitation behaviors, or is it
| continuing to demand super-vigilance from the victims?
| sailfast wrote:
| Just wanted to say that I found this phrasing to be
| fantastic.
| jjulius wrote:
| Agreed, this was a really well-put response.
| wharvle wrote:
| You can have:
|
| 1) An "ethical" system in which a bunch of people are losing
| money and are surprised by this, unaware of it, or intend to
| stop it, haven't yet, but absolutely would if it were as easy
| as thinking "stop that". But they said yes somewhere along
| the line, so it's all "ethical".
|
| 2) A just-as-ethical system that... simply doesn't do that
| bad stuff in 1, or at least does way less of it.
|
| It's weird to me that people defend situations akin to 1 when
| 2 is totally achievable, on the grounds that "well 1 isn't
| technically unethical (as I define it)". Ok? So _what_? 2 is
| better and isn't less ethical. What is going through
| someone's head when they defend 1 and dismiss or put down the
| notion of 2? If you could flip a switch to toggle between the
| two, would you _really_ leave it on 1? I do not get it. Why
| not pick the version with better outcomes?
|
| [edit] and, separately, I think it's plainly unethical--to
| put it mildly--to add terms to a contract or steps to a
| process that you _know with great certainty_ your
| counterparty will later regret or dislike, relying on their
| overlooking it or not having better options, _purely_ for
| your own benefit at their expense. I don't think their saying
| "yes" makes that ethically an ok thing to do--it's straight-
| up predatory. But even if it does make it Ok, why prefer that
| over... not-that?
| janalsncm wrote:
| > No one is looking out for you
|
| This is literally what law enforcement and consumer protection
| is for. Otherwise we could make the same argument about
| pickpocketing victims, which is frankly what this is more akin
| to.
| paxys wrote:
| So willingly going to netflix.com, picking a plan, entering
| your credit card info, hitting subscribe and watching TV for
| the next month is the same as getting pickpocketed?
| moshun wrote:
| It is when systems are intentionally designed to be
| extremely low friction to initiate and extremely high
| friction to cancel. In a lot of cases that's exactly what
| happens.
|
| To be fair, there should probably be a national consumer
| protection law that ties complexity of cancellation to
| complexity of sign up.
| well_actulily wrote:
| Some states in the US have laws on the books so that if
| you can sign up to a service online, you need to be able
| to cancel online--at least.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I signed up for a service years ago - scent bird - and it
| was nearly impossible to cancel.
|
| They kept changing the app and I could never find the way
| to cancel (turns out it doesn't exist). I would just eat
| the most monthly because I never wanted to spend the time
| to figure it out. One day I sat down to check their
| website. No way to cancel.
|
| So I went to the support page. It has a deep-link to the
| cancellation page. The link is broken. Reddit and others
| couldn't find a valid link. Everyone said to DM them on
| social media.
|
| So I tried to contact support, but they don't publish a
| valid email or phone number staffed conveniently in my time
| zone.
|
| So I blindly emailed "support@" and asked to cancel. The
| response was another broken deep link. I replied no I
| wanted support staff to do it. They refused. So I told them
| I was a California resident and we have a law on the books
| requiring that online signups can be cancelled online and
| support staff is legally required to honor a cancellation
| request. No reply.
|
| I got an email a few days later cancelling my account for
| violating their arbitration clause in their TOS.
|
| _This_ is basically pickpocketing.
| jms703 wrote:
| Strongly disagree. You gave them the means and permission to
| bill you on a regular basis. These area valid and legal
| transactions. There are no protections from poor judgement
| (if you deem a subscription to be a poor choice).
| m463 wrote:
| I think it is human nature.
|
| If someone was hired to manage your life, and they did what you
| did, they would be fired with contempt.
| nunez wrote:
| I agree. It's absolutely crazy. I think about this every time I
| see someone pull out their massively stacked wallet full of
| cards. I couldn't live like that.
|
| However, it's not entirely the people's fault. Credit card
| providers make it really easy to sign up for their cards but
| make it really difficult to do things like "add an alert that
| texts me whenever a purchase above $0.01 is made" or "alert me
| when my 0% APR promotional period is ending" or "tell me when
| i'm about to pay a late fee".
|
| All of them will make you go through a labyrinthian exercise to
| turn these alerts on, if they make them available (LOOKING AT
| YOU, CITIBANK) and many will not alert you on anything less
| than $50, which is crazy given how many transactions are
| smaller than that!
|
| Also, in a world where everything is getting more expenses and
| incomes aren't keeping up, using a tool that reminds you how
| broke you are on a daily basis isn't fun. So I can understand
| why folks shy away from it. I certainly did when I was living
| at the edge for a few years after I graduated. (That said,
| having this data is essential for creating a plan to change
| that outcome, but thinking long-term is not fun.)
|
| Regardless, things are getting better. Most utilities and other
| services accept eChecks now with Bill Pay, which allows people
| to pay for their recurring expenses from one place. Many
| restaurants and shops use Toast, Stripe, Clover or newer NCR
| POS's which make it easy to email your receipts. (A pet peeve
| of mine is restaurants that use Stripe or something like that
| but don't accept Apple Pay or hand you a bill instead of a
| mobile POS. Like, come on; you're already paying for these
| features!)
| jjice wrote:
| > All of them will make you go through a labyrinthian
| exercise to turn these alerts on, if they make them available
| (LOOKING AT YOU, CITIBANK)
|
| How long ago is your experience with this from? I ask because
| I just got my first card from Citi within the last three
| weeks and was able to turn these on really easily before my
| card arrived. I actually have a notification for $16 sitting
| on my lock screen from them as I type this.
| nunez wrote:
| A few months ago? I'm glad it's easier!
| jjav wrote:
| > It's absolutely crazy. I think about this every time I see
| someone pull out their massively stacked wallet full of
| cards. I couldn't live like that.
|
| If you want to maximize your credit score (and you should
| since it'll give you better rates, saving you money) you want
| to have lots of credit cards with high limits.
|
| One of the factors that goes into your credit score your
| available credit. You want your available credit to be very
| high but your utilization to be very low (but not zero).
|
| I keep lots of credit cards, at least one or two from every
| major bank and some from smaller ones. Thus my available
| credit is very high and so is my credit score.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| > . I think about this every time I see someone pull out
| their massively stacked wallet full of cards. I couldn't live
| like that.
|
| Some folks in this situation are likely just optimizing for
| rewards / points / sign-up bonuses. I've had more than 10
| cards at a time and definitely have my financial "house" in
| order. I get many free several-thousand-dollar trips per year
| to boot.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Whenever I get a free trial of Prime, I immediately set a
| reminder on my phone to cancel it in a month. It's really not
| that hard.
| paxys wrote:
| You can also immediately go to settings and choose not to
| renew. It'll still be active for the rest of the month.
| JohnFen wrote:
| It's even easier to reject all free trials of everything.
| That's what I do.
| marssaxman wrote:
| I habitually reject subscriptions and automatic payments,
| too, as far as possible, so I can retain full control of
| the flow & timing of my expenses.
|
| (For services where it's not possible, I subscribe them to
| a single credit card, which I treat as though it were
| another utility bill.)
| Buttons840 wrote:
| You suggest that spending 30 minutes a month can improve
| someones financial situation.
|
| In those 30 minutes they could cancel unused subscriptions and
| maybe save $50 a month. $50 a month isn't bad, but it's not
| going to be the difference between retiring comfortably and not
| retiring.
|
| Or they could spend those 30 minutes updating their resume and
| applying to a job; if they apply for a better job every month
| they could easily find a better paying job that gives them an
| additional $20,000 a year, especially if they do this
| consistently.
|
| Overall, I agree people would benefit from more effort put into
| their personal finances, but people have limited mental energy
| and their time can be better spent on things other than
| cancelling subscriptions. Indeed, if someone is willing to put
| effort into improving their financial situation and the best
| option society offers them is for them to pinch pennies and
| cancel their subscriptions, that is a sad situation for them
| and reflects poorly on society.
| Unbefleckt wrote:
| Luckily we have many waking hours in a month to do both.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| If you do both, then you are spending at least some of your
| time sub-optimally.
|
| Education, applying to jobs, entrepreneurial ventures, etc,
| all of these have higher expected value than cancelling
| subscriptions.
| bluetomcat wrote:
| Not cancelling subscriptions has a high correlation with
| irresponsible spending habits. The same person will
| likely amass a large amount of stuff that stays unused.
| Instead of repairing, they will buy new. When they buy
| new, they don't consider the longevity and durability of
| the item.
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| people aren't thought experiments in ancap-economics
| textbooks.
|
| irrational behaviour is core to not only people but
| pretty much every lifeform on the planet.
| nightski wrote:
| I guarantee you there are very few on the planet whose
| time management is so strict that spending 30 minutes a
| month to review their finances would cut into any of
| those activities.
| susjznzoaoa wrote:
| some people work nearly every waking hour (I have more the
| a few hundred weeks in my life for sure) other huge
| logistical challenge that comes out of this is the hours
| for the call center need to overlap when you're not working
| so you can call someone to cancel.
| bluGill wrote:
| $50 a month won't get your retied, but it will free up some
| cash to use for better purposes.
| neilv wrote:
| > _(especially the ones who can least afford it)_
|
| > _[...] basic budgeting, retirement savings, not paying random
| fees, not paying interest, moving spare money to investment
| accounts every month, rebalancing your investments every
| quarter, negotiating rents, negotiating your salary._
|
| These look like things that are generally unavailable to those
| who can least afford not doing those things.
|
| It's expensive to be poor.
| wsatb wrote:
| Requiring someone to call to cancel your service is almost
| always a shady business practice to make it difficult enough
| that it's not worth their time. If it takes you less than 5
| minutes to sign up, it should take you less than 5 minutes to
| cancel. If you can sign up without talking to someone, you
| should be able to cancel without talking to someone.
|
| That type of practice could use some sort of regulation.
| ianburrell wrote:
| There could be a rule where should be able to cancel with the
| same mechanism that signed up. If signed up and use the
| service with app or site, then should be able to cancel with
| them.
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| It's called nickel and diming and the term originated when they
| stopped being something you could buy a sandwich with.
|
| I'm not surprised at all, a few billions is paltry. I think i
| have a few subs that i've forgotten about for months or years.
| I have several bank accounts and several credit cards, things
| become complicated.
|
| At the time i liked what those people were making, or i wanted
| to watch a certain series, etc.
| Loughla wrote:
| I'm with you on every point except
|
| >negotiating rents
|
| I have never, ever been in a situation where a rent negotiation
| would have done anything except ensure I didn't get the
| apartment.
|
| Is that real? Where?
| bluGill wrote:
| With a small landlord it is sometimes possible. Even with the
| large ones if you let them know you are looking at moving you
| can sometimes get a discount for the year. Note that you need
| to be serious about moving to pull this off: you need to
| actively look at other places to live, and be ready/willing
| to follow through and move if they don't give you what you
| want. Apartments are competitive markets for new renters, but
| once someone is there the hassle of moving means people are
| often willing to pay more.
| jjulius wrote:
| Anecdotally...
|
| I've lived throughout the US - Seattle, Atlanta, East Bay,
| Portland - and each time I've leased a place I've pushed back
| and asked for cheaper rent. Sometimes it's worked, sometimes
| it hasn't, but that's never ended a conversation or resulted
| in them walking away.
|
| The home I'm renting now, I asked my landlord to reduce their
| proposed rent increase by 75% if we committed to a two-year
| lease, and they were fine with that. Never been an issue for
| me, and if a potential landlord bristles at something like
| that, then it's a sign that things may not be so great after
| I've signed the lease.
| civilized wrote:
| There is more than one way to feel about this situation! I
| watch my finances, but the hours I spend on it feel wasted, and
| I am resentful of the people whose parasitic attitudes towards
| my bank account make this necessary.
|
| It's as if, when I go to relax or exercise, my only option is
| hiking in a tick-infested field. I spend an extra 15 minutes
| prepping my clothes before going out, and an extra 15 minutes
| checking every inch of my body after I come back in.
|
| It's true that all this extra work is my responsibility. It's
| also true that ticks suck (literally) and it would be
| preferable if there were a way to prevent them from
| parasitizing me in the first place.
| CivBase wrote:
| The line between reasonable responsibiliy and unreasonable
| responsibility is subjective and blurry. We can generally agree
| it's my responsibility to not waste my life savings on novelty
| mugs, but it's _not_ my responsibility to keep my money in an
| armored vault at home in case a burgler breaks in and tries to
| steal it.
|
| Laws exist to protect people from bad actors so our time and
| efforts can be better spent on things that are valuable to us
| and society.
|
| Is 30 minutes a month an unreasonable responsibility to protect
| against companies taking advantage of people with unutilized
| subscriptions? Should the law be updated to enable people to
| save people that time and effort? Maybe. I don't think it's an
| unreasonable thing to at least consider.
| keb_ wrote:
| I don't disagree with you, but lots of people do not take
| charge of their financial health simply because they do not
| know any better, or are too trusting to entities that will loan
| them money. And they are that way likely because their parents
| were that way too.
|
| A common thing I hear when talking about things like the
| student loan crisis and the housing market crash of the late
| 2000s is "well no one forced them to take out those loans" or
| "I took out a loan and I paid it off, why can't they?" But when
| it's as prevalent an issue that more than half of undergrad
| students in the U.S. are in debt, and the fact that poor people
| taking out subprime mortgages just so they can have somewhere
| to live can cause a global financial disaster, it starts making
| me think -- yeah maybe it is the "government's fault". Maybe us
| smart people on the top have to understand not everyone is as
| smart as us, and we have to build a system that works for all
| the truly clueless folk.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| > No one is looking out for you. You can either endlessly
| complain about it or build some good habits. 30 minutes of
| effort once a month to go over bills and budgets is hardly the
| end of the world.
|
| I don't disagree, but I'd point out that this applies to
| basically anything in life. Relationships, exercise, health,
| work, etc. The fact is people prioritize and many don't
| prioritize their finances. All of us drop the ball on
| something.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > 30 minutes of effort once a month to go over bills and
| budgets is hardly the end of the world.
|
| Maybe for someone who already has good financial habits it is
| 30 minutes, but for people who never bother with this it will
| take far more time.
| lacrimacida wrote:
| > It's bizarre to me just how many people in this country
| (especially the ones who can least afford it) simply do not
| take charge of their financial health.
|
| It's designed to be complicated, confusing or easy to forget
| just so it traps people at least once. It's borderline fraud
| sometimes, at least it feels like that to me. The recourse is
| to be super vigilant but when you let guard down you fall into
| a trap and it's hard to beware all traps at all times
| especially when they're being constantly evolving
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| Honestly this is a very out of touch view. And you assume
| people don't do these things. Of course they do. Some don't.
| But you're making a broad generalization.
|
| People _do_ check this stuff. Even then it 's easy to forget
| about something for a few months. Or ask if your SO is using
| something.
|
| There are so many charges on a typical CC statement that
| spending time every day going through them isn't always worth
| it either.
| jjulius wrote:
| >It's bizarre to me just how many people in this country
| (especially the ones who can least afford it) simply do not
| take charge of their financial health.
|
| But, see...
|
| >No one is looking out for you.
|
| ... that's just it, isn't it?
|
| Nobody's looking out for you. We send kids to public school
| from ages five to eighteen, but at a broad level, we do not
| have a requirement for any of that education to be about how to
| take charge, and stay on top of, your fiscal health. I'm not
| sure how you can look down on others like that when a large
| chunk of people are kicked into adulthood without ever having
| been taught how to look after themselves financially.
| sahila wrote:
| But you can teach yourself, like how most everyone who is
| looking over themselves financially did. Learning doesn't end
| with schooling, and for most they know that, doing dance,
| art, and sport classes for example all on their own. It's
| just that financial literacy isn't a priority.
| jjulius wrote:
| If it's not a priority for people, and we understand that
| there is an incredibly wide range of circumstances that
| everyone is in, much of which don't allow for easy fiscal
| education, access to it, or time for it, it should be
| pretty darn obvious that it should be a part of our basic
| education system. Am I to take your response as a
| suggestion that we shouldn't bother introducing this
| subject matter as a requirement at the public school level?
| jchw wrote:
| Note that you are currently making excuses for blatant dark
| patterns for some reason. I dunno why we're doing that. People
| should definitely push harder to not waste money, but entities
| should not abuse their position to try to push them into
| passively allowing it. There's so many things you need to take
| care of in life that I don't imagine most people ever really
| get to give as much attention to all of the facets of their
| lives as they need to, and finances are only one of them. The
| fact that someone is effectively stealing your money and
| forcing you to trade it for time and effort you could spend
| doing anything else is criminal. (I mean, literally, it should
| actually be criminal. If I don't want to be subscribed, fucking
| unsubscribe me. That means you Planet Fitness after I moved to
| California.)
| sangnoir wrote:
| > It's bizarre to me just how many people in this country
| (especially the ones who can least afford it) simply do not
| take charge of their financial health.
|
| They may be too exhausted from their second job - or from the
| one job they have to be on their feet the whole work day - and
| may not have the mental energy to comb through financial
| statements. You have the luxury of time and energy, so real
| reasons sound like excuses to you. I would recommend you
| (re)read John Scalzi's essay on Being Poor[1]. Except:
|
| >> Being poor is knowing how hard it is to stop being poor.
|
| The link between stress and poor decision-making is well
| studied, and unfortunately poor financial health is self-
| reinforcing: being poor is very expensive!
|
| 1. https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/
| petsfed wrote:
| Eh, there's a pretty big difference between "I'm too lazy to
| solve this" and "the only reason this requires so much effort
| is because the business would lose a ton of revenue if people
| could simply stop paying for things that they don't want to
| have". There really is no reason why cancelling a subscription
| at some predefined point in the future should require any kind
| of business-hours-only-must-talk-to-a-physical-person approach,
| and if your CSR handling your cancellation is not empowered to
| actually process your request (which is pretty common with e.g.
| cable and phone companies as well as gyms), then its abuse,
| pure and simple. I know what my hourly equivalent is, so if the
| cost to my employer (or myself, if I'm an independent
| contractor) while I sort this out when I should be working is
| more than the monthly bill itself, then it becomes not worth my
| time to sit on the phone and deal with it.
|
| I had a regular order with Chewy, until the dog food brand I
| was having drop shipped stopping selling that particular type
| of dog food to Chewy (but I could get it somewhere else). And I
| had to sit on hold for 30 fucking minutes, just so Chewy would
| stop charging me (considerably more) for, and shipping to me,
| dog food that I did not want, had never wanted, and was
| actually shopping elsewhere to avoid. And I didn't find out
| that they didn't carry that brand anymore until they shipped
| "what we believe is the closest match" to me. I honestly
| thought it was a mis-pick initially, so when I went to resolve
| it, I followed _that_ customer service UI pattern, to no avail.
| They 've changed it since then, but the fact still remains,
| that was not at all a scenario I should've needed to call in
| for. I certainly shouldn't have needed to sit on hold for it.
| When I finally spoke to the CSR, she was apologetic that I even
| had to talk to her about it.
| snarfy wrote:
| And people wonder why I write checks and lick stamps like a
| boomer.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Whenever this subject comes up I'm disheartened to see how many
| are willing to blame the victim: the consumer.
|
| We have allowed businesses to exist whose only really business
| model is duping customers into a subscription and then making it
| difficult or impossible to cancel. Just go look at timeshares
| [1].
|
| I would dearly love to give money to some quality news
| publications to support their work but I don't. Why? Because I
| absolutely don't ever want to deal with their subscriptions
| department should I ever want to cancel.
|
| Ever tried to cancel an Equinox gym membership? I've seen half a
| dozen sign up constulants standing around at the entrance,
| someone call up to cancel and being told there's no specialist
| available.
|
| Cancelling a service should be no more difficult than pressing a
| button on an app or a website. We passed the CAN-SPAM Act to
| force compliance in communications for businesses [2]. The same
| should apply to taking their money.
|
| Speaking of gyms, it's an anti-user business model. The perfect
| gym customer is one who pays for a membership and never uses it.
| The more members a given gym can "support", the more profitable
| it is. If everyone used it 2 hours a day they'd go out of
| business. Planet Fitness took this one step further and removed
| their most popular equipment to dissuade people from going and
| charging so little that people usually can't be bothered to
| cancel it.
|
| All US cable/Internet start with an introductory rate that
| quietly gets jacked up over time. You can go through a "cancel
| dance" to renew that rate every year or so but it's absolutely
| exhausting to have to deal with this.
|
| VPNs do the same thing. $2.99/month introductory price! Wow!
| Bargain! It just quietly gets jacked up later on.
|
| This is what government is for.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd2bbHoVQSM
|
| [2]: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-
| act...
| the_snooze wrote:
| >Speaking of gyms, it's an anti-user business model. The
| perfect gym customer is one who pays for a membership and never
| uses it.
|
| My gym managed to find itself in a great little niche by being
| the complete opposite: they'll call you if you haven't been in
| for two weeks, then bug you to either start coming in again or
| pause your membership. The result is a dedicated membership
| base of regulars who seriously want to be there, which sustains
| itself on word-of-mouth referrals.
|
| Of course, this is a small-time operation and not a national
| chain like Planet Fitness.
| cryptozeus wrote:
| This is why I use copilot or earlier Mint. They are great at
| detecting these recurring payments
| tedchs wrote:
| Fwiw, when I've forgotten to cancel something, I've had success
| saying something like "I was checking my credit card statement
| and was surprised I'm still paying for X. I haven't used it at
| all since Y date. Would it be possible to have a refund, perhaps
| partial, since then, for $xx?". Basically I make it easy for them
| to say yes.
| yedava wrote:
| Subscriptions should have a time based expiry option. It's
| trivial to implement from a technology standpoint and not
| providing that option is an anti-consumer tactic. The fact that
| all businesses are so anti-consumer is a testament to the
| dystopian times we live in. Technology is being used to actively
| harm us.
| anbotero wrote:
| Businesses these days with these dark patterns. I denounce them
| and immediately cancel anything when they start just fine and
| suddenly implement something hard to get out of.
|
| I hate when their cancelling scheme puts blocks in front of the
| user so it's harder and harder to quit. In my country I've
| noticed some have their Cancel Subscription page unavailable, or
| it says it has cancelled it but you don't get email or
| confirmation of anything, and then surprise, another month
| payment, and then you have to call, and they leave you waiting
| for hours.
|
| I despise this and I denounce them with local regulation
| authorities, then they get moving, and even then they may still
| squeeze another month out of you, attribute it to error and just
| expect you don't denounce them again because that would be even
| more time from you.
|
| But this is me... I know lots of people who spend at least 6
| months before they have the time/energy to actually go through
| this process so they can cancel.
|
| I'd say to hell with them, it gives bad rap to good businesses
| which let you cancel/pause without too much hassle.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| I think subscriptions are a "dark pattern" on the web. Often they
| start after a free trial with minimal knowledge. This could be
| one category of subscriptions that are not cancelled.
|
| Personally on my projects I never auto-renew anything. If you
| find value you'll take the time to come back and pay again. I
| wish by default subscription services like Netflix would not
| charge you for months you don't use the service (I.e. if you
| never logged in once)
|
| I know this probably won't happen because forgetting to cancel is
| good for the bottom line but if your company is truly customer
| obsessed, I don't know why you would charge your customers for a
| service they're not using at all.
|
| Edit: Also, omitting the "cancel subscription" button from your
| website if it's that simple and instead redirecting users to call
| a number that's hard to find in your Help section is another
| "dark pattern" of subscriptions.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Obviously, if Netflix adopted a pay-per-use model, earnings
| would crater. AOL made so much $ from ppl forgetting to cancel.
| neilv wrote:
| Try canceling your Amazon Prime. Every order now, I have to be
| careful not to re-activate Prime, with all the dark patterns.
|
| I also have to keep switching the shipping method on an order
| page, from the paid option, to the free (non-Prime) option. And
| there's a _long_ spinner (sometimes ~15 seconds) to punish me
| when I click the radio button. (In the past, they 've also
| hidden a default trial of Prime in the shipping option radio
| buttons, so that's another reason to check that.)
|
| (If only Walmart.com, Target.com, Walgreens.com, etc. would
| close the gap to even current Amazon, we'd have better options
| and less trashiness. Anecdotally seems like Amazon -- either
| from the top, or from individuals juicing their metrics -- are
| taking advantage of Amazon's enviable competence and position,
| and cashing out excess goodwill.)
| paulpauper wrote:
| This is why VPN and Squarespace/Wix ads are so pervasive on
| youtube: lots of ppl forgetting to cancel.
| havblue wrote:
| This reminds me of a recent commercial where a father is looking
| at a phone bill and complains melodramatically that the family is
| wasting money, only for his wife to condescendingly tell him to
| switch cell phone plans and show up for dinner. Um, I think
| people who scan the bills to find services they don't need are on
| the right track...
| smallerfish wrote:
| I'd like to call out ZenBusiness on this one. They allowed an LLC
| (which to be fair we weren't using actively) to enter a
| delinquent state, but continued to charge the registered agent
| fee for 2 additional years until we noticed; each year we'd get a
| "your XYZ LLC is going to automatically renew" email from them,
| with no mention of the fact of outstanding annual reports due.
| After that they had the gall to charge penalty fees to reinstate
| the account, on top of the state fees. Definitely moving to a
| competitor at end of year when it comes time to renew again.
| nunez wrote:
| I can't wait for services like Privacy to enter the mainstream.
| It's coming. (I'd like to think that it's coming.)
|
| When 90% of your user base is using super-easily-createable
| disposable credit cards from valid BINs that self-destruct after
| your free trial's over, the way free trials work will have to
| change.
| nmstoker wrote:
| Isn't this how Michael Dell got going originally too? Newspapers
| for newlyweds, initially free they'd then keep going with the
| subscription
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| Like wars in the Middle East?
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Their average response was $62. When they were given more time
| to guess again, they increased their estimate to $96. They were
| still way off. The correct answer was $273.
|
| I have been in rooms at SaaS companies where the fact that people
| forget to cancel the subscription was described as an important
| benefit of the subscription model, and a reason to set the price
| at something easily overlooked.
|
| People are terrible at estimating or keeping track of their
| subscriptions, myself included. A couple years ago I
| painstakingly audited all my recurring subscriptions. Painstaking
| because I had to go through all my bank and credit account
| statements for a year looking for the services that billed yearly
| or semi-yearly rather than monthly. I had also drastically
| underestimated what they cost me, by about a factor of two in my
| case. I think of myself as being very frugal about this kind of
| thing, so it was a surprise.
|
| But then I was able to save myself almost $1000 a year just by
| eliminating some unused subscriptions I had sort of forgotten.
| Not forgotten entirely, but services I sort of failed to think
| about as costs, because the monthly spend for them individually
| was so low. But once I thought about them as a _yearly_ cost, and
| then about the _total_ yearly cost for all these little services,
| that successfully (and more accurately) reframed the situation.
|
| I didn't find unsubscribing or cancelling to be particular
| onerous. I do use Privacy.com now, which would make it both
| easier to track and theoretically easier to cancel. Ironically,
| Privacy.com is a monthly subscription (at the tier I use) but it
| is definitely worth it.
|
| I told people about the $1000 a year "raise" I got by just
| trimming dead weight. I told them they should do the same
| exercise--make a spreadsheet, have a column that multiplies the
| monthly fee by 12, and think about it as a yearly cost instead--
| and they were all, uniformly, without exception _certain_ that
| they already knew what they spent, and it wasn 't really very
| much.
|
| My advice: do the exercise anyway, it is worth it.
| paxys wrote:
| Gyms, cloud storage, restaurant buffets, insurance all follow
| this business model. If everyone paying into it actually
| expected to extract their entire money's worth of value the
| whole industry would collapse.
| hartator wrote:
| > restaurant buffets
|
| Buffets have monthly subcriptions?
| rappatic wrote:
| No, their entire model is based on the assumption that
| users _could_ extract maximum value from the buffet (eating
| everything) but typically _don 't_ (have a normal- to
| large-sized meal, the supply cost of which is obviously far
| less than what the customer pays to get in). The parent
| commenter's point is that many businesses are run this way
| (eg. the gym is not equipped for 100% of subscribers to go
| to the gym every day, just as the buffet is not equipped
| for 100% of customers to eat a huge amount).
| hartator wrote:
| I mean I don't go to buffet to eat a lot, but just
| because I like what they serve and I can make my own
| plates. We exist.
| jjulius wrote:
| >Gyms, cloud storage, restaurant buffets, insurance all
| follow this business model.
|
| I'm struggling to understand how you can lambaste people by
| saying "jUsT cAnCeL iT"[0] when you seem to be well aware of
| the business model of gyms, wherein cancelling a membership
| is widely-known to be a purposefully cumbersome and difficult
| experience.
|
| [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39059793
| snarf21 wrote:
| Yeah, was just going to say this is Planet Fitness' whole value
| prop .. Cheap enough that the lie you tell yourself that you
| will go more next month is easily worth $10 / month.
| antisthenes wrote:
| Planet fitness hasn't been $10 for a while now.
|
| Their cheapest plan is something like $12.99 and with fees
| it's up to $18 or so. And that was 5 years ago.
| godisdad wrote:
| I'm here for the recommendations for apps to cancel subscriptions
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| Serious lack of empathy in this thread, mostly by a bunch of
| incredibly wealthy individuals that have their life in order.
|
| When a lot of people struggle with certain categories of
| problems, it's worth considering if those problems could be
| nerfed in some way rather than telling them just "get good".
|
| There's definitely a huge slew of predatory billing techniques
| and dark patterns to get people to keep paying for services.
| These patterns should be documented and destroyed.
|
| Having more accessible billing methods also makes life better for
| everyone (maybe except the company). Consider how absurd it is
| that only from California can you cancel your New York Times
| subscription online while every other state requires you to call
| in and deal with a retention agent. Let's not pretend this is in
| any way reasonable, it's straight up bullshit.
|
| Sure personal responsibility is important, but there's no reason
| we should accept predatory and abusive practices from companies.
| It just makes reality worse for everyone.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Serious lack of empathy in this thread
|
| I think it's something learned, and that is, something taught
| by the far right ideological movement and others trying to
| create cultural change. Empathy is outre, it's embarassing.
| Embracing contempt and cruelty makes people look smart, these
| days.
|
| Empathy is fundamental to human rights, freedom (for others),
| equality, equity, justice, fairness. It leads to truth. By
| attacking that fundamental infrastructure (the empathy), you
| can undermine it all.
| zoba wrote:
| I'm very eager for a consumer version of Ramp where I can issue
| myself a card per-subscription service. Then I can review all the
| cards I've issued, and turn them off if I no longer want the
| service.
|
| I would immediately sign up if this existed.
| jmholla wrote:
| I feel like this might be a good place to share something I
| learned recently about credit cards: interest accrues daily, not
| by statement (e.g. monthly). Further, your statement does not
| accurately reflect what you owe for that billing period. Instead,
| the interest for that period will be reflected on your next bill.
|
| I had errantly figured I could postpone my payments to the due
| date and not accrue interest, but that is not the case and I
| ended up with a few hundred dollars more in interest than I
| expected.
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| For anyone trying to avoid this, sign up to Personal Capital
| (bought out by empower or something), link up ALL your bank
| accounts, credit cards, etc. Then once a month go in and check
| every single line item charge and ensure the charge was properly
| labeled.
|
| Now if a companies autocharge is extra sketchy, such as not
| informing you about auto pay, enabling it automatically, etc,
| just threaten a chargeback when contacting their support and most
| the time they'll immediately refund you.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| It's useful to periodically cancel a credit card / get a
| completely new number / etc to break automated billing you have
| forgotten.
|
| I think there's credit cards that offer this as a feature now.
| hankchinaski wrote:
| I put most of my non essential subscription spending on virtual
| debit cards. I rotate the virtual cards frequently so stuff that
| is low priority gets automatically blocked and churned out.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| This was a hidden savior that helped some of the publishing
| industry delay what was already a precipitous decline. As soon as
| I became aware of recurring billing through Recurly, I switched
| all of the products of my employer at the time to a subscription
| based model. Yes, it takes a bit more work on the part of the
| customer service agents who deal with angry customers who do not
| want to be billed anymore, but on the flip side, it's usually
| many months before people who are not using the service realize
| that they have continued to be billed.
| smeej wrote:
| I was recently appalled to discover how many of my subscriptions
| _auto-updated the expiration date_ when my card expired.
|
| I had hoped to use "ignore it until charges stop going through
| because jumping through their hoops is ridiculous" to cancel a
| few pesky subscriptions and it didn't even work!
|
| I think this is a "feature" of using Stripe for billing? Or
| something? I couldn't find anything obvious that they had in
| common but that.
| dcotter wrote:
| I'm surprised literally no one suggested just cancelling the vast
| majority of your subscription services and cutting ties with
| unethical companies. The suggestion that poor people need yet
| more help from the government because they're too dumb, busy, or
| gullible to know when they're about to get screwed is
| condescending. The suggestion that the core audience of WSJ and
| HN needs this is pitiful.
|
| Want to watch a movie? Borrow the DVD from your local library.
| Want to watch it repeatedly? Buy it off Amazon. Want to read a
| book? Library. Amazon. AbeBooks. Want to get fit? Go for a hike.
| Do pushups. Buy a barbell and free weights.
|
| Here's my personal finance plan: Check your bank account daily.
| Cancel services you don't need. Don't do 30-day trials. Don't
| sign up for overdraft "protection" at $40 a pop. Use cash if you
| can't handle plastic, and don't use credit cards. Just don't
| borrow money, period, if you're not using it to buy a house.
| Don't let anyone take money out of your checking account but you.
| If a company screws you, never do business with them again. Pay
| up front for a year of service and mark when it renews. Write
| checks before you give out your card numbers.
|
| I know, Stone Age, right? But I like to keep my life simple.
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| I'm using a service called Subly that keeps track of all of my
| recurring payments and puts them into a database that I can view
| at a glance. It shows me which day of the month it renews, how
| much, and to which card or account it will be charged. This
| includes my annual renewal fees as well. It then shows me what my
| average monthly expenditure is.
|
| With this I can see that I'm spending roughly $112/month on
| subscriptions. The whole thing couldn't be much easier.
|
| The service costs $4/month. The irony of that is not lost on me,
| but the convenience of seeing my recurring monthly charges is
| worth it for me.
|
| https://web.subly.app
| olejorgenb wrote:
| How much does it provider over simply taking the time to add
| the numbers to a spreadsheet? Does it integrite with
| bankstatements or automate the prosess in other ways?
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