Here is my little cost-cutting initiative that took me about an hour to put together. I wanted to put all of my subscriptions on a spreadsheet to take a look at the big picture. The monthly charges for each individual service are often minimal and can hide among the other small expenses such as beverages and food on your statements. I usually glance over these as I suspect most people do, and that’s the problem. It’s actually why many businesses are moving to the subscription model because people are more likely to make the purchase when they opt for a monthly plan. Once people are on monthly plans, they’re also very likely to ignore the charges and not cancel. Therefore, I was not surprised to discover that my yearly cost for these subscriptions is close to $2,000.

On most services, I was able to either cancel or downgrade my service. I’ll select a few examples to show my reasoning for either downgrading or canceling.

Netflix – I had the 4K subscription and the ability to stream on up to 4 screens at a time. At the moment, I stream mostly older shows that are definitely not in 4K, and most of the time, I have a show on in the background while I do either work or chores. So I’m not watching the screen enough to really appreciate the full 4K resolutions, and I’m often watching these on either computer screens or a mobile device.

Grammarly: This is a service that I signed up for on the monthly plan because I wasn’t sure how much use I would get out of it, but it turns out that I use this quite a bit. I really like having the extra pair of eyes reviewing my writing for work and personal use. I didn’t see myself canceling this service over the next twelve months, so I decided to just pay for the entire year and save over $200 that way.

Adobe Subscription – I’ve had this subscription for a few years that started when I was regularly taking photographs as a hobby, and I have a lot of pictures stored in the cloud. Even when I was taking photos regularly, I was only using just one of the programs included in the subscription–Adobe Lightroom. The other programs included Photoshop and others that I never use. Thankfully, I was able to downgrade my subscription to eliminate the unnecessary programs and keep my online storage. If I take the time, I can probably safely remove the photos and stop the subscription altogether. But that would take time as I have nearly 80,000 images on there.