Should You Cancel That Monthly Membership?

I think we all have these little monthly memberships that we collect up and frequently forget about or sometimes we grow out of them, but we don’t cancel them right away. Why do we do that?

Maybe you got a low price and if you unsubscribe you’ll lose that deal and have to pay a higher price if you rejoin at a later date.
Maybe you feel like it will get better or you’ll need it again and then it won’t be there.
Maybe you feel a bit of loyalty to the person that runs the membership program and you don’t want to let them down hitting cancel on your membership.

I spent quite a bit of time paring down my expenses this year and I realized during my evaluations that there were three memberships that I just wasn’t using at all. They were between $9 and $17 per month each, so collectively I saved $40 per month by cancelling all three of those memberships.

I’m not going to tell you which ones I chose to cancel, because that’s not the point of this post. The point is you could be throwing away money without even realizing it. That membership might sound good in theory, but if you’re not *using* it the way it’s meant to be used then you’re just spending money on –nothing–

At first glance, $40 might not seem like a lot of money, but I can do a lot with an extra $40 per month!

• $40 per month could be a $10 per month allowance to each of my four kids. (I’m sure they prefer this over the other choices…)
• $40 is the cost for my family of six to see a movie at the theater on a Sunday morning.
• $40 covers the cost of my Ethan’s asthma medication for about two months.
• $40 covers the cost of one box of Dylan’s contact lenses.
• $40 covers one co-pay at the doctor’s office.
• $40 would buy nice new shoes for one of the boys – maybe even two of them if there’s a sale!
• $40 would buy a new pair of green Chuck Taylor’s for me
• $40 is almost a full tank of gas in our minivan
• $40 would be enough to take my boys out for ice cream on a hot day – TWICE!

$40 x 12 = $480 savings over the course of a year, and I can do a lot with an extra $480 in my pocket!

• $480 would pay for my hotel room at a three day conference event.
• $480 would cover at least two payments to my son’s orthodontist.
• $480 would buy several week’s worth of groceries for my family of six.
• $480 would buy holiday gifts for my kids. AND the groceries for Christmas dinner. AND have money left over. (We celebrate simply on a small holiday budget, no big extravagant piles of gifts here.)
• $480 would pay off a lightly used credit card balance.
• $480 is about what we spend on clothes and supplies during school shopping at the beginning of a school year.
• $480 would cover our expenses when we drive to Pennsylvania (from Virginia) to visit family and friends over the summer.
• $480 would reserve 40 hours of time on my virtual assistant’s calendar.
• $480 would cover renewal of a dozen domain names for FOUR YEARS! – and that’s rounding up –

I think you get the idea.

So before you let that monthly membership subscription automatically renew just because – think about whether or not you’re actually using it. Are you getting any benefit from being a member? Is it something that you at least look forward to each month? Or is it just there doing absolutely nothing other than costing you $XX amount per month? Where could you better invest that money – either in yourself or in your business?

I’d love to hear how much money you save by cancelling your unused membership subscriptions and what awesome thing you’re going to do with that money instead. Drop me a comment below 😉

Loretta

Transcriptionist, passionate cross stitcher, writer at heart, wife, mom, and finder of lost shoes… Loretta Oliver, married to the comic book geek of her dreams and mother of four amazing young men, has been working from home full time since 2001. With a busy transcription service business, a few niche sites, and a handful of other internet marketing projects on the go, the computer is always fired up and the ideas are always flowing.