The average American Family spends $237 a month on subscriptions. Here are my strategies for avoiding these income sucking recurring expenses:
Music Streaming Via PC:
Youtube works great for this if you want specific songs. If you are looking for a good playlist mix, then Pandora is worth a try. Many of the bands that I listen to were discovered through songs from Pandora. See my adblock section to avoid listening to sponsorship ads on both Youtube and Pandora.
Music Streaming Via Phone:
I find that this isn’t a terribly important thing for me. It isn’t that I don’t like to vibe, but I tend to spend a lot of time driving in the car by myself at this period of my life, and I have always found that time conducive to audiobooks. If I do want to listen to music, I have an app called NewPipe, and this allows me to listen to youtube videos ad free. It is a great app, and has totally replaced the youtube app on my phone.
Adblock
I use the uBlock Origin extension for Firefox on my laptop. This blocks commercials on Youtube and Pandora. On my phone I use the extension “NewPipe” when I play youtube videos. This eliminates sponsorship ads. I don’t listen to Pandora on my computer.
Amazon:
I use Ebay and Aliexpress extensively. That being said, Amazon is the one subscription that I pay for. I have a student account, which is half price. In 2023, I spent about $6000 on Amazon.com. Which means that my Amazon Prime Visa credit card (which nets me 5% back per purchase instead of the 2% that I get with my regular cash back card) netted me around $300, which is $180 MORE than a 2% cash back card would have. Thus paying for my subscription, and making me a tidy profit. Additionally, and I can’t say this for certain, but I suspect that the customer service representatives are more accommodating when they see that I’ve had a subscription for 9 years or whatever. On any given year I save ~3x what I pay in subscription costs. Most of this is through product support. For example, recently (last week at the time of my writing this) I received a refund on a $200 item that had a few pieces missing. I was able to order the missing pieces for about $30 online, meaning that that single transaction paid for the next 3 years of my Amazon membership. I also provide one of my siblings and my parents access to Amazon, since they are also cost conscious value added shoppers like me.
Netflix/Amazon Prime/ Streaming Platforms
First of all I discovered a few years back that no one really cares if you’ve watched such and such a movie or series. People often like to relate to others through film, and they will bring up plot lines or movie quotes, and if you don’t tell them differently, they’ll assume you have some idea what they are talking about. I personally enjoy reading synopses of shows or movies on Wikipedia, and occasionally I’ll watch a few movie trailers on youtube. This gives me the basic familiarity with the plot lines, characters, and funny moments without the massive time investment required to watch the whole movie or tv series. People, for whatever strange reason, like to be able to connect over something that they have both experienced. I like to be able to relate to people, and I don’t follow sports (another common connection point), so I try to spend an hour or two every few months doing this instead.
Personal Fitness:
When I was in college and had access to a gym, I used it 2-3 times a week. I found it to be helpful to have someplace where I could go, not think about anything, and just do some physical activity. Regular exercise at home is difficult as I have young children who like to be with dad and copy whatever he is doing, and it just makes blocking out time and space to work out challenging. Right now I am building a house, and I find that the amount of exercise that I get from moving raw materials around and crawling on and off my tractor provides sufficient exercise for me. I honestly think that I may be more fit now then when I was hitting the gym multiple times a week while in college simply because my weekends are very physically demanding. As time goes on and I finish the house build (and gain a bit of free time) I’m open to the idea of a gym membership, since if it takes me from zero exercise to multiple days of exercise weekly, the price of the gym membership would be insignificant in comparison to health care expenses down the road.
Phone Plans
For years I was on a family plan with my brother on AT&T. I felt like my connectivity was good with them, but they were $30 a month per phone. Not as expensive as some people’s plans, but I eventually found something better. I now spend 12-15$ a month on my phone plan with RedPocket. I have the same network (AT&T) and I’ve never really noticed any significant connectivity issues.
News and Magazines
Do people really still spend money on this? I use my local library’s subscription if I ever need to log on to the New York Times or a similar website to finish an article, but mostly I’ve come to the realization that it isn’t important to keep up on the news. Anything that is truly important tends to get communicated to me via my friend group, and that is, in my opinion, a much better way to learn about news then any journalist, no matter their style. This is because news doesn’t matter. 99% of the news article I’ve ever read didn’t truly matter to me. If this is your hobby, that is fine, but it certainly isn’t mine. I can’t find it in me to care.
Food and Meal Services
I think it is important to carefully structure your life to allow time for the cooking and consumption of food. I’ll be up front and say my wife does significantly more of the food prep than me. I tend to be on tap for waffles, pancakes, and scrambled eggs, etc. She seems to enjoy it, and I’ve never felt the need to step in and take it from her, though if she ever goes back for her Master’s there is a good chance I’ll need to step it up.
Gaming:
People often talk about hobbies as something that they couldn’t imagine themselves without. Video games used to be that for me. I loved them. I still do, there are about 3 or 4 strategy games that I’ve played over time that I would love to spend an afternoon (or seven) enjoying. But I have instead chosen as my hobbies things that are more physically demanding. Hiking, construction, etc. Choosing not to game was a default because I wanted to do things with my time that prevented me from gaming (construction/hiking/electrical engineering). If I had continued gaming instead of taking up those hobbies, my career prospects, financial situation, and probably my mental health would have all suffered.
Software and Cloud Services:
So I do pay for this website, it is about $75-100 annually. That is only because I want a public platform where I can share who I am (and my thoughts) without pointing someone to a social network website. I don’t pay for anything else software or cloud related. I’ve used Libreoffice for years (though my work and my school both currently have a Office 365 subscription for me).
Financial Services
I do pay fees on several of my accounts, but they aren’t management fees, just fund fees of around 0.08%. My bank(s) charge me nothing. I do have a loan for the property that my wife and I recently purchased to build our house on, so I spend money on the interest on that money, but the amount I spend on interest is less than the appreciation on my property right now, so I’m not too distraught about it.
Book and Audiobook Services:
I use my library extensively for this purpose. Overdrive, Hulu, and the free website Librivox. It is rare that I can’t find a specific book, If I do, I just add it to a list, and check a few years later to see if it’s distribution has broadened. Very rarely do the books I read need to be finished by a certain date.
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