Submitted by AbandonedToilet t3_1042j7o in personalfinance
So I'm usually pretty good with my finances or at least lately I have been trying to get a hold of how much money I am spending and being mindful of every dollar I have spent. Two years ago I had some mental health issues and for whatever reason I signed up for untold amounts of subscription based services during this time and stopped monitoring my spending. I usually put everything on my credit cards and at some point my credit card was put on lockdown by the credit card company because apparently the auto payments I had setup were bouncing back. So many of the recurring bills weren't going through. I had no idea or at least I wasn't paying attention.
Anyways over the last six months I paid off those cards, and started noticing all these bills from a ton of companies hitting the card. I did my best to go through my credit card activity, identify, and cancel all the recurring transactions I didn't need, because all those recurring bills started to hit my card once it was unlocked. There was probably 15+ recurring subscriptions that were hitting my card. A few I have literally not been able to locate the sign in info for the accounts I used to purchase the subs and I have been having to call the companies and spend hours on the phone while they attempt to locate the account that's billing my card. Some of them I can't even get a hold of a customer service representative to do that so I'm paying for something I have no idea how I signed up for it.
For the most part I have quelled the fire. However what I'm now dealing with is that I apparently signed up for stuff that is on annual billing cycles and just when I think I've gotten a hold on it something pops up every month. I am losing my mind with this I have no idea how I signed up for so much. I know part of it is I probably signed up for trials out of boredom and then they are just billing me annually, but it scares me because some of the stuff is like $100-200/yr. Just yesterday I had 4 subscriptions worth $70 hit my Paypal account. I then somehow figured out I have 2 Scribd accounts I am paying for. It's driving me insane, do I need a budgeting software in order to comprehensively analyze what I have paid and predict what might hit my account? I feel like I am playing whackamole with this. Or should I request all new cards be issued? I just want it to stop. Thankfully I have a great job and can afford this crap but still it's like.
EDIT: I did not think I would get this many replies. I appreciate the solid advice, I didn't even think that I might still be on the hook for charges if I just removed the ability for the billing vendors to charge my accounts, so that's good to know. That being said I was able to find a software that could summarize payments by vendor and was able to discern the vendors I don't recognize and I am on the path to getting these accounts shut down (there's only one unresolved now). Obviously I will be on top of my finances from now on going forward.