DALLAS — Think of how many subscriptions you have. Now see if you can think of a few more that didn’t come to mind right away. Now review how many of them you still want to have.
Tech company Bango ran a survey on subscriptions earlier this year. They included subscriptions for all kinds of categories: Streaming video on demand, retail, music, gaming, news, health & fitness, sports video on demand, home/internet of things, physical goods boxes, food boxes, and education.
In all but two of those categories, retail and streaming video on demand, the firm found that Texans led all other states and the national average in the percentage of consumers who have subscriptions.
Texans willing to pay those recurring bills
They also found that, on average, Texans have six subscriptions, which cost an average of $1,236 over the course of the year, the most in the U.S., and far above the national average of $924 a year. Some of the higher outlay might be attributable to the level of subscriptions Texans seek. The survey found that Texans were more likely than other Americans to cancel a subscription if it included advertisements.
This all suggests that you may be paying a lot of recurring bills for things that may not be so much of a need as they are a want, which means you may have a few more notches available if you have been trying to tighten your financial belt.
And there is a decent chance that you might not even want some of the services for which you are repeatedly paying. It’s just that you may have forgotten you were even signed up for them.
If only we could remember…
As the Wall Street Journal has reported, “Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel”. Additionally, a research firm found a couple of years ago that 42% of Americans, “Admit they’ve stopped using a subscription service but forgot they were still paying for it”.
A paper last year that included a Texas A&M researcher concluded that when people are forced to pay attention and actively re-up their subscriptions because their credit card on file expired, there was a “Sharp, abnormal drop in subscriber retention rates”.
In other words, many people canceled their subscriptions when they were reminded of a service they were paying for but may have forgotten.
That said, the Bango subscription survey finds that Texans are the most likely to cancel a subscription because of price hikes. If you have your subs set up on auto pay, periodically check the price. They can go up fast when you’re not looking.
It might be a good idea to set an annual date–like the day after tax day to check your subscriptions and see if you still really want them…and want to keep paying for them.
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