I found out I was paying for a streaming service I had not used in eight months. Eight months. I had watched one show, finished it, and completely forgotten the subscription existed. At twelve dollars a month, that is nearly a hundred dollars for absolutely nothing.

You probably have at least one subscription you forgot about. Most people do. Here is how to find and cancel them fast.

Check your payment history

Open your bank app or credit card statement. Search for the word “recurring” or scroll through the last three months of transactions. Any charge that appears monthly or annually with a similar amount is a subscription. Write them down. Be honest — if you subscribed to a meal kit service in January and have skipped every delivery since March, that counts.

The fastest cancellation routes

• App Store subscriptions (iPhone): Settings → tap your name at the top → Subscriptions. Every active subscription is listed with a cancel button. This takes thirty seconds.
• Google Play subscriptions (Android): Play Store app → tap your profile icon → Payments & subscriptions → Subscriptions. Same thing — cancel from one screen.
• Amazon: Account → Memberships & Subscriptions. This catches Prime, Kindle Unlimited, Audible, and any Subscribe & Save items you forgot about.
• PayPal: Settings → Payments → Automatic Payments. PayPal tracks recurring payments from multiple services in one place, including ones you may have forgotten you connected to PayPal.

The subscription audit method

Set a recurring calendar reminder — the first of every month — to scan your bank statement for subscriptions. Ten minutes, once a month, indefinitely. This is the habit that prevents the problem from coming back. I have a calendar event called “subscription audit” that pops up on my phone. I ignore it about half the time and that is still enough to catch things within a month or two instead of eight.

What to do if a company makes cancellation hard

Some services bury the cancel button or require you to call. If you cannot cancel online:

• Call and say “I want to cancel.” Do not explain why. Do not accept discounts. “I want to cancel” is a complete sentence. Repeat it until they process the cancellation.
• Use a virtual card or privacy.com card for subscriptions in the future. You can pause or close the card with one click, cutting off the payment without dealing with customer service.
• Dispute the charge with your bank if the company refuses to cancel after you have clearly asked. You have documentation — the call, the email, the support chat — and banks side with consumers in these situations.

After my streaming service incident, I found two more subscriptions I had forgotten about. Total savings: about forty dollars a month. That is almost five hundred dollars a year I was giving away for services I was not using. The ten-minute audit pays for itself immediately.