Happy Tuesday!
Here's the latest update on my personal data archive clean-up project for the first quarter of 2025. Hopefully you all are enjoying the window into this very real and personal application of Tidy Bytes concepts, but either way I'm going to keep reporting it for my own accountability:
- Week: Q1/2025, Week 5
- Files deleted: 721 (220 GB)
- Files triaged: 937,355
I'm still dealing with a lot of pre-filtered stuff, mainly duplicate (old) copies of a ton of programming projects and related files. The de-duplication step will eliminate almost all of it. Though, deleting 220 gigabytes of data in less than a thousand files was fun; that was an old set of digitized media backups that are no longer relevant.
I'm pretty much done with the gathering stage, but I'm going to take one more week to look over all of my devices once more and make sure I haven't missed anything. I'd like the de-duplication process to work on everything I have all at once.
Invisible Expenditures and Forgotten Finances
Something I haven't really mentioned in years of Tidy Bytes material is financial data, other than perhaps a comment or two about important files you want to back up. I did this mainly because Tidy Bytes is primarily about data organization, and financial management is a different topic. However, I'd bet that many or even most of us--if we track our finances at all--use computers or websites to do it, and that means there's at least some overlap with Tidy Bytes subject matter.
Still, I'm not about to tell you how to budget, where you should invest, or anything even remotely close to that. Instead, I want to focus for a minute on how you might want to keep financial data tracked and organized, starting with the most insidious piece: recurring subscriptions. 💵🔁📅
(Now, if you are one of the lucky few who maintains good records of all of your recurring expenses already, feel free to take this week off. Good job!)
When you buy something, whether online or otherwise, you're typically pretty aware of the transaction. You know when it happens, how much it's for, and whom you are paying. It happens exactly once.
But when you subscribe to something, most (or sometimes all!) of the payments happen later, and they usually never stop unless you intervene. Free trials, first-month discounts, annual payment periods, and more make it incredibly easy to lose track of the all-important data that explains where our money is going. A few dollars per month for a single app subscription isn't much, but when you have twenty of them, plus a few cloud storage subscriptions, plus a few streaming music or video subscriptions, plus a coaching program or two or five...
Suddenly, you're looking at (or rather, failing to look at) hundreds of dollars every month, maybe thousands of dollars per year.
Is there anything inherently wrong with spending that money? No! Fun, convenience, learning, life improvement--all these are perfectly valid things to pay for. The problem is in not keeping tabs on those expenditures, which makes it much harder to identify any that you might want (or need) to stop.
How many of us have found ourselves realizing we forgot to cancel that free trial we started a month ago, or forgot to stop that exercise program subscription before the next year billing cycle hit? It's not a fun position to be in, even if a call to customer support results in a refund.
Keep An Eye On Things
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The solution here is not complicated, though there are many ways to go about it. In short, there are two steps:
- Capture a list of all current subscriptions
- Maintain the list by adding any new subscriptions as soon as they begin
You might realize this is really just one step, but split in two by the assumption that the "maintain" part hasn't been happening from the beginning.
Practically, this doesn't require very much. You don't even need to keep detailed financial transaction records for all of your accounts--although doing so does make a lot of financial tracking easier. I've seen people stay on top of their subscriptions with a single piece of paper on their fridge. It looks something like this:
- Netflix - $15 monthly on the 20th
- Spotify - $12 monthly on the 7th
- Amazon Prime - $139 annually on 1/31
- Chase CC annual fee - $69 annually on 1/1
It doesn't have to be more complicated than this, or created in any particular order or presentation. Just write a new line anytime a new subscription begins, or cross one out anytime it ends.
Having this information available for reference gives you the power to make informed decisions, to stay on top of how much is disappearing from your accounts automatically and on what time frame, and to make more comprehensive budgets (if you're someone who does budgeting).
Unsurprisingly, the method I use personally is a little more detailed and nerdy, but it's fundamentally the same. I created an Excel spreadsheet with all the details I could think of to help me stay on top of things and make changes easily, if necessary. It looks like this:
In addition to the basics of what it is, how much it is, how often it occurs, and when it occurs, I also keep track of:
- Relative priority (how bad would it be if I stopped paying this?)
- How confident I am of the amount (exact subscriptions are easy, but farther down I have a round number for groceries)
- The expense category, just for reference
- Why I'm paying for it (including forthright reasons like the fact that I pay taxes to avoid going to jail)
- Whether I--or the government--consider it optional even in the most extreme sense
- Whether I could change the service or product to keep some of it but reduce the payment
- When I last verified the information (most in this screenshot are quite old! I should fix that.)
- Which account the payment comes from (extremely useful in case you close a credit card due to fraud, for example)
You might also notice the "SP Acct" heading, which is unrelated to data organization but worth mentioning because of how incredibly helpful it is. Some of my annual or semi-annual payments (electronics design software, property taxes) are quite large, and it's not fun to have an outsized expense hit even when you know it's coming. Therefore, I use SmartyPig with a high-yield savings account as a buffer. For example, I deposit $50/month into one account so that when the corresponding $600/year expense hits, I can pay for it outright instead of carrying a CC balance or scrambling to make up for it elsewhere. It eliminates a ton of stress, and the account earns nearly 4% interest while I wait for the expense to arrive. I highly recommend this approach.
(If anyone would like this spreadsheet to use as a template or starting point, just reply and let me know. I don't have it available to download anywhere at this point, but that could change easily enough.)
Subscription Finder Tools
I've used account tracking software for years to stay on top of all of my bank, credit, and investment accounts: the now-defunct Microsoft Money, Quicken, Mint, Empower (formerly Personal Capital), and finally settled on Moneydance as a modern, less-bloated equivalent of Quicken. This degree of visibility into every account makes it as easy as possible to observe and track recurring transactions.
But what if you don't have that option? Or what if you hate the idea of hunting through account registers to figure out which expenses are recurring?
While nothing can match a comprehensive manual review, there are some shortcuts that will save lots of time. First, if you use Apple and/or Google, both platforms provide a comprehensive one-stop view into all subscriptions managed directly through their platforms. Also, some major banks like Chase and CapitalOne highlight recurrent payments for you in their online banking portals. This page has some short guides on identifying subscriptions on each of those platforms.
If those options don't work for you, or they don't cover all of your accounts--especially if you have many subscriptions outside of Apple and Google and/or you don't use larger banks, you can also use Rocket Money's subscription management tool. This requires connecting your online bank accounts to Rocket Money (like Mint, Quicken, or Empower), so just keep that in mind if you are hoping to avoid doing that. If so, manual review is pretty much your only option.
Be aware that tools like Rocket Money can miss things here and there if they don't have enough data to work with. For example, an annual subscription is hard to pin down if your bank only provides six months of history during an account sync operation; until a full 12-month period (or longer) is available, annual charges look like individual one-off payments. Just stick with it, and eventually you should get a clear and complete picture.
In short, if you haven't already been working on a list like this, try to accept the fact that it will probably take a few months at least to fill in the holes that exist after your first attempt at making the list. But even so, you'll probably find the vast majority right away, and that's a win for sure. Once you have a starting point, keeping it updated with new, modified, or canceled subscriptions only takes a minute or two for each modification. Whether you keep it in Excel, on your fridge, or elsewhere--keep it somewhere.
What you do with that data is up to you, but I'd bet most people who go through the process will find at least one easy and painless way to save some cash. Even $10/month turns into well over $1,000 saved in a decade.
Thanks for your eyes and ears for yet another week, and I hope this diversion into finance was interesting and useful.
Happy data-taming!