Raise your hand if you're guilty of subscribing to something that you rarely, if ever use.

This is a safe place, right? Then I'll be first to raise my hand and admit that I wasted $360 last year on a gym membership that I used maybe three times in 2018. Oh, it gets worse. That gym membership is one of the three that I actually have in my name. I started working out at Crunch late last year because they were supposed to be renovating the fire damaged Park Center Fitness near my apartment into their newest location. It's been months and I haven't seen any movement there, so I hung on to my other gym membership in Downtown Boise "just in case" we got another Snowpocalypse year where I'm afraid to drive more than a couple miles from home. Dumb. I'm a big dummy.

But I'm not the only person in the Treasure Valley wasting money on subscription services or membership programs that I don't use.  According to Nerd Wallet, many people admit to spending $200 a month on everything from gym memberships and streaming services to personal styling services and cloud storage. That adds up to $2400 a year!

If that sounds astronomical, the experts suggest taking a look at how much you spend in the following categories and then have an honest conversation with yourself about which services are actually serving you positively in your life:

  • Streaming Video (Hulu, Netflix, YouTube Premium)
  • Streaming/Satellite Music (You know what, just get rid of all these...we rather you listen to us! That's why our app is 100% free!)
  • Photo Storage (I forgot that I pay $.99 a month on iCloud storage simply because I don't know how to permanently delete photos from the cloud and make my phone stop telling me my iCloud storage is full.)
  • Online Storage (Even with the huge audio files I work with here at the station, I've never come close to filling up my free Google Drive Account.  You probably don't need to be paying $1.99/month for 100 gigs of space through Google or another service like Dropbox. It's way harder to fill that space up than you think!)
  • Personal Styling (I have a StitchFix addiction, but when I realized I don't have enough days in the week to wear all my new outfits, I dialed back on how often I was scheduling a "fix." It still beats driving to the Village or Boise Towne Square Mall to try things on, but there's no chance of scoring a good sale with a box like this.)
  • Magazines, books and news subscriptions
  • Gyms (And this includes boutique gyms like Orange Theory, F45, too, not just your typical big gyms like Axiom or Crunch.)
  • Meal Boxes (Now that Albertsons owns Plated, it's far easier to go into a local store and buy one the evening you know you're going to cook it, rather than leaving the ingredients for the one that got delivered to your door sit and rot in your fridge because you're just too busy to cook.)

With so many of these subscriptions being internet based, it could take you literal seconds to cancel yours or turn off your auto-renew.  As Nerd Wallet points out, that's well worth saving a couple hundred bucks a years, right?

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