The monthly money saving experiments continue!
Subscription Freeze/Subscription Fast
First off, at some point, we cancelled all of our subscriptions. Going on a temporary streaming freeze is amazing. Keep in mind, the beauty of streaming services today is that there is no contract and no penalty for cancelling. If your desire to re-stream gets bad, simply click, and restart your subscription. Cancelling and re-starting subscriptions is an easy, free, and painless process.
Here’s the list of subscriptions we’ve used and/or cancelled.
- Amazon Prime (current – we pretty much always have this, but recently switched to monthly subscription for flexibility)
- Amazon Music (current – Unlimited HD, currently on trial, Ad free music is a must!)
- Netflix (current – single screen, monthly)
- Hulu (current – no Ads, of course!)
- Starz (cancelled – wanted to watch a certain series)
- HBO Max (cancelled – had it to watch a series, might sign-up again later)
- Sling (current – seasonally for college football)
- Duolingo Plus (cancelled – sometimes I get on a language kick and re-subscribe)
The beauty of cancelling services is that is saves a ton of money each month. We usually find that we watch the shows or series we want, then drop the service for months or sometimes years before we find out it has a series we want, then we sign up again. We only ever have a few services active, and dropping them prevents months of paying for something we aren’t using. It’s also very seasonal (depending on where you’re living). In the winter months, we typically have a few more subscriptions).
Once we get the feeling “there’s nothing to watch on here” we cancel.
Usually, re-starting our subscription is just as fun as getting it for the first time. If a long time has passed, we usually have a few weeks of watching or binging all the new series and movies that have been added. Sometimes there’s movies or series we’ve been hearing about all year and then we finally get to watch it!
*Pro-tip, get a password manager or keep track of all your sign-ins so it’s extremely easy to restart subscriptions. We’re all for saving money and keeping things clean, simple, and easy (we’re not into gaming free trials, etc., we save enough by only having a few services at any one time, tracking our spending, and avoiding the headaches of multiple emails/accounts, etc.).
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