I sat down one Sunday and went through six months of bank statements. I found four subscriptions I had completely forgotten about: a streaming service I had not opened in eight months, a fitness app I used for three weeks during a New Year’s resolution, cloud storage I signed up for to get a free trial, and a meal kit delivery I paused but apparently never cancelled.

Total waste: about sixty dollars a month. Over seven hundred dollars a year. For things I was not even using.

Subscription creep is real. Companies design their cancellation processes to be just annoying enough that you put it off. Here is how to find and kill the ones bleeding you dry.

How to Find Them All

Check your bank and credit card statements. Go back three months. Look for any recurring charge — even small ones. A $2.99 monthly charge you do not recognize adds up to $36 a year.

Check your app store subscriptions. On iPhone: Settings > your name > Subscriptions. On Android: Play Store > profile icon > Payments and Subscriptions. You will find things here that do not show up as obvious charges on your bank statement.

Check PayPal. Log in, go to Settings > Payments > Automatic Payments. PayPal has its own subscription management system separate from app stores and direct billing. I found one I had completely forgotten about here.

Check your email. Search for keywords like “receipt,” “subscription,” “invoice,” “your membership,” “renewal.” Every service sends confirmation emails. They are a paper trail of everything you have signed up for.

How to Cancel Without the Hassle

Some companies make cancellation intentionally difficult — buried settings, required phone calls, retention offers. A few tricks:

• Privacy.com or virtual credit cards. Create a one-time-use card for subscriptions. When you want to cancel, just delete the card. The service cannot charge you anymore. This also prevents surprise price increases.
• Cancel through the app store. If you started a subscription through Apple or Google, cancel it there — not through the company’s website. The app store cancellation is binding and usually one tap.
• “Moving abroad” excuse. If a company requires you to call and they give you the retention runaround, tell them you are moving to a country where the service is not available. Shuts down the retention script immediately. It works.

After my audit, I cancelled four subscriptions and switched two more to annual billing (which is usually cheaper). I saved about eighty dollars a month. Set a quarterly calendar reminder to repeat the audit. It is the highest-paying hour of work I do all year.