My 17-year-old daughter told me that she’d been offered a special deal at the Verizon store: access to Apple Music for up to six people for $10 a month. She was desperate to take advantage of the promotion and said the streaming service had an amazing selection of songs.
I said no, not only because we have Spotify, but also because I’d had a rude awakening after New Year’s.
My husband and I were worried about how much we were charging to our credit cards, especially during the holiday period.
We decided to do a financial tune-up, and I was responsible for reviewing the Mastercard statement. We only used it as a secondary payment method if a merchant didn’t accept American Express.
I thought I’d been subject to fraud
As a result, I rarely looked at the bill. This time, however, I printed the statement covering November 11 to December 12, 2025, when we did most of our Christmas shopping.
There were a few transactions for items like coffee at a little café that doesn’t take Amex and some co-pays for doctors’ visits, but there were others I didn’t recognize.
Have you made a mistake with your personal finances? Please email Jane Ridley at [email protected]
What on earth was Uexton? I’d paid them $19.99 on November 11. Then there was Sportelx, to whom I’d paid $29.55 on November 21. I’d never heard of it.
I Googled to find that Uxeton was a gaming website and Sportelx was a sports news service.
I’d been a victim of fraud on several occasions, and assumed it had happened again.
Then, I looked over the rest of the bill and saw payments of $29.99 to ESPN New York, $14.99 to Canva, and $11.95 to Audiobookstore.com. As far as I was concerned, neither my husband, kids, nor I had used any of them.
There was also a $25 fee to Rockin’ Jump, where my son went once a week before getting too old for a trampoline park. Why were we still paying for his membership?
I reviewed the last two months’ statements and realized the suspicious payments had occurred before, on the same day each month.
It wasn’t fraud. The recurring fees were subscriptions we’d signed up for before switching banks and credit cards. Some went back years. We had failed to cancel Rockin’ Jump. I didn’t know how the rest had come about.
Over the next few hours, I racked my brains trying to figure out where they came from. The only thing I could think of was that my spouse or I must have shared our credit card information at some point to get a trial subscription.
We’d wasted almost $1,600 annually
We must have forgotten to cancel at the end of the free or discounted period. The total of our unnecessary payments was $131.88 a month, the equivalent of a family cellphone plan.
Over the years, I calculated that we’d spent almost $1,600 annually on streaming and other services we didn’t touch. It was hard to blame the companies that use subscription models when I had been the one to drop the ball. I felt dumb and ashamed.
I sprang into action, canceling as many fees as I could. In most cases, I found it much more difficult to unsubscribe than to subscribe because of the hoops you have to jump through.
Still, the experience taught me a lesson. It’s no thank you to tempting — but ultimately useless — offers from now on.
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