The Unsubscribe Hour

Finding the subscriptions you forgot you were paying for

A single-sitting method for finding every recurring charge on a statement, deciding each one in under a minute, and setting a date to do it again before they quietly return.

About this book

Recurring charges are unusually good at outliving their usefulness. Nothing announces that a subscription has stopped earning its place; it simply keeps charging, in an amount small enough that no individual month justifies the effort of dealing with it.

This book is a single-sitting method for finding all of them. It starts with reading a statement line by line, once, properly — which most people have never actually done — and includes the practical detail of where recurring charges hide, including the ones billed annually and the ones under a company name that resembles nothing you recognise.

Each charge is then decided in under a minute using a one-minute rule that is set out explicitly, because the decision is where these exercises stall. The book is direct about the fact that a charge you cannot immediately justify is usually a cancellation, and about the small number of cases where that is wrong.

There are chapters on cancelling without the retention conversation, on the services that make cancellation deliberately awkward and what to do about them, and on setting a date for the next hour — because they return, quietly, and an hour scheduled six months out is the only part of the method that has to survive on its own.

What is inside

• Why subscriptions outlive their usefulness unnoticed
• Reading a statement line by line, once
• The one-minute rule for each recurring charge
• Cancelling without the retention conversation
• Setting the date for the next hour

Who it is for

• Anyone who cannot list their recurring charges from memory
• People who have found a forgotten subscription and suspect there are more
• Readers who want to do this once, thoroughly, rather than continuously
• Those who dread the cancellation conversation and would like a script for it

From the book

A subscription does not announce that it has stopped earning its place. It simply keeps charging until somebody reads the statement.

Details

• Format: PDF ebook
• Length: 53 pages
• Language: English
• Delivery: instant download after payment
• Protection: none — no DRM, no device limit
• Thirty-day refund on every purchase