Little Fixes That Could Save You $10,000

Instead Of Cutting Back On The Things You Love, What If You Could Find And Plug The Money Leaks That You Might Not Realize Are Sapping Your Budget?

- Kate Rockwood

MONEY LEAK:

Having Subscription Apathy

That free wellness-coach trial you signed up for (and forgot to cancel). The credit-monitoring service you keep meaning to ditch. The gym membership gathering dust. That monthly beauty box you’re no longer into. Sure, no single subscription or membership is going to break your monthly budget, but in sum those commitments can quickly hit triple digits each month. These “gray charges” (as they’re known in the industry) may collectively be costing us $14 billion a year. “Companies know how to bank on people’s apathy,” says Emily Guy Birken, a personal finance expert and the author of End Financial Stress Now.

You can zap those recurring charges by periodically reviewing your financial statements or outsourcing the task to a free, AI-powered app, like Trim or Truebill. Both securely sync to your bank and credit card accounts; Trim sends you a text message listing your recurring charges each month, then cancels any unwanted subscriptions on your behalf.

FIX IT AND SAVE: $215 a year (the average amount of gray charges Americans have incurred).

MONEY LEAK:

Rarely Checking In on Your Accounts

If you glance at your bank balance only when you fear that funds are dipping low, consider this: Real-time financial info may supercharge your saving instinct. Researchers found that people using a finance app checked their account 12 times a month but logged on to their accounts’ desktop version via website only twice a month. And app users cut spending by nearly 16 percent overall—shelling out about 20 percent less on both dining out and groceries. Mint has been the budgeting app gold standard for some time (and it’s free), but if you prefer a bare-bones answer to how much you can spend at any moment without wrecking your budget, check out PocketGuard.