How to find every subscription you are paying for

Ask someone to list their subscriptions and they will name four or five. Ask them to check, and the real number is usually higher. The ones that get forgotten are not the ones you use every day. They are the free trial that quietly became a charge, the app you stopped opening, and above all the yearly renewal, which only shows up once and is easy to miss.

Finding them all takes about half an hour if you know where to look. There are five places.

1. Your bank and card statements

Start here, because this is the only place that shows every charge regardless of where you signed up.

Go back thirteen months, not three. That extra length is the whole trick: it guarantees that every yearly renewal appears at least once. Look for the same merchant charging the same amount on a regular beat. Small amounts deserve as much attention as large ones, since a $4.99 charge is exactly the kind nobody questions.

Do not forget cards you rarely use. An old card that still has one subscription on it is a classic.

2. Your phone's app store

Subscriptions bought inside an app are billed by Apple or Google, so on your statement they all look the same and tell you nothing. The store itself has the list.

• iPhone or iPad: Settings, then your name at the top, then Subscriptions.
• Android: the Play Store, then your profile picture, then Payments and subscriptions, then Subscriptions.

Both show what is active and when it renews, and both let you cancel on the spot.

3. PayPal

If you have ever paid for anything recurring with PayPal, it keeps its own list of merchants that are allowed to charge you automatically. It is in your PayPal settings under payments, as automatic payments. People are often surprised by what is still in there.

4. Your email

Search your inbox for the words that subscriptions use. These catch most of them:

• receipt
• renewal
• your subscription
• trial ends
• payment successful

You are looking for the sender as much as the email. Once you know a service is billing you, it goes on the list.

5. Amazon and other big accounts

Some accounts hide subscriptions inside themselves. Amazon has a Memberships and Subscriptions page in your account that covers Prime, channels and anything on subscribe-and-save. It is worth a look even if you think you know what is there.

Put them on one page, in monthly terms

A list is only useful if you can compare the items on it, and you cannot compare $89 a year with $12.99 a month at a glance. So convert everything to a monthly figure. Divide yearly prices by twelve and quarterly ones by three.

Then add it up. This is the number that tends to get a reaction, because a dozen charges that each seemed small turn out to be a real line in your budget.

Keeping it that way

The audit is the easy part. The hard part is that the list goes stale the day after you finish it, since the next free trial is already waiting.

This is what the Subscriptions tab in Almanac is for. Each subscription shows what it costs in monthly terms, so yearly and monthly plans sit side by side, with a total underneath. You can add them by hand, or forward a subscription receipt to your personal Almanac address and let it read the amount. You can export the list to a spreadsheet whenever you like.

It is free to start, and it does not connect to your bank. If online shopping is where more of your money goes, the companion guide on tracking your Amazon spending covers that side.