Stop Those Automatic Renewals on Your Credit Card That You Forgot

A credit card statement can be the last thing you’ll want to read. It’s only full of bad news — all the charges you made in the past month and now have to pay for.

Those numbers can also bring you good news if you look at them carefully and take some action.

Chances are your credit card has at least a few automatic renewals on it each month for things you rarely or never use — a Hulu subscription you don’t watch or a child’s online gaming fix. Some may be free trials you forgot to cancel after the trial period ended, now costing you $20 or so a  month for a service you don’t use.

There are easy ways to get rid of such subscriptions if you don’t want to carefully check your credit card statement yourself and call or email the offending companies. Two options are Hiatus and Trim — free services on phone apps that check your credit card statement and alert you to recurring charges before asking if you want them to cancel a service for you for free.

According to Hiatus, the average consumer wastes more than $500 annually on automatic renewals they don’t want and either forgot about or didn’t get around to cancelling. These aren’t the same as credit card add-ons that banks pitch customers, though they can be added without a cardholder noticing.

It found out in a survey it did that almost two-thirds of people pay for unwanted subscriptions because they don’t cancel the auto-renewal feature. Most people forget about the recurring charges, and 20 percent said the renewals are too much of a hassle to cancel, according to the survey.

How Hiatus works

You start by giving read-only access to Hiatus for your checking or credit card account. It scans the data and before a subscription is about to be renewed it alerts you and asks if you want to cancel the service.

You can also see all of your subscriptions at once on its app, and can cancel an unwanted service with a single tap on your phone.

Hiatus will call or email the service to ask that your account be removed from its automatic renewal program. You won’t need to give Hiatus your password to any site. Some businesses don’t allow others to cancel subscriptions, so you may have to join a Hiatus representative on a phone call to confirm who you are and that you want to stop a service.

How Trim works

Trim uses a read-only access token so that it doesn’t store your online banking credentials. It uses an algorithm to find your subscriptions automatically, and another algorithm moves your request to cancel a subscription to the correct biller and makes sure the cancellation happens.

Trim cans your bills for merchant names that commonly bill for recurring payments, and it can tell which merchants aren’t subscriptions but are places you visit often — such as a coffee shop each morning.

It sends you a text message list of your subscriptions, and you choose which, if any, to cancel. If Trim can’t cancel a service with an email, it can call or send a certified letter for $6.

Trim says its average user cancels one subscription and saves $15 per month, or $180 per year.

Check automatic renewals after checking credit profile

If a careful look at your credit card statement isn’t reason enough to cancel automatic renewals, then checking your credit profile could be a good reminder.

While checking your credit report won’t show you specific transactions you’ve made on your credit card such as automatic renewals, it could point you to credit errors or credit utilization numbers you may want to fix or improve.

Credit report checks are most common when consumers are about to buy a car or home so they can raise their credit score before applying for a loan. Lowering expenses such as recurring payments for a bunch of services you don’t use can improve a credit score relatively quickly by having less of your credit utilized.

And what to do after you’ve canceled any automatic subscriptions you no longer want? The best thing to do may be to have that savings automatically transferred to a savings account so you can buy something you really want or are trying to save for, such as a vacation or funding an emergency fund.

After all, if it took you months to notice a charge at a health club you no longer visit, then you didn’t really miss the money anyway. You might as well put that found savings to work for you elsewhere.