In our modern world, it’s easy to pay twice for something you only need once. With auto-renewing polices, memberships you didn’t realise you have and busy families with multiple devices and accounts, it’s likely that you’ll accidentally be double-subscribed to some services at times.
So, in order to save money every month, let’s do a little life admin and get those subscriptions sorted once and for all.
Check your paperwork
The first and easiest way you can save money on being double-subscribed is to check the paperwork of the services you already use – most importantly, your insurances. Read through what’s included in each policy and see if you can find any overlapping cover.
It’s often the case that we are over-insured for some situations, such as:
- Phone insurance that you took out with your contract, but your phone is already covered with a tech ‘bubble’ insurance.
- Having tech ‘bubble’ insurance when your devices are already covered in your home contents insurance.
- Choosing individual repair plans for your appliances when they might be included in your buildings or contents insurance.
- Buying UK vehicle breakdown cover when you also have a European breakdown policy you took out before going on holiday.
- Getting a single-trip travel insurance when you already have a year-long policy.
- Taking out travel insurance when you have a premium credit card that already includes family travel insurance.
- Paying for health or dental insurance when it’s already included as an employee benefit of your job.
- Also, you might simply have two insurance policies for the same thing (such as home insurance, travel etc) if your original agreement auto-renews and you didn’t realise and have since taken out the same insurance with another provider.
Plus, you can save money on the insurance you do buy if you choose the correct product for your needs. For example, a worldwide travel insurance policy will be more expensive than a European policy so, if you know you’re only planning to travel in Europe this year, there’s no need to over-insure yourself.
Likewise, a policy that’s more specific to the people who are using it will be cheaper, for example – travel insurance plans for seniors will be better suited to the needs of mature travellers compared to a policy that covers a family with children – and you’ll therefore be paying the best rate for your situation.
When you find situations where you’re double-insured, it’s important to read through similar policies to compare them and see which one offers you the best protection or higher payouts. Then you can confidently cancel the second unwanted policy to prevent it from renewing and therefore save money on your monthly budget in the future.
And you may even be able to get a portion of your payment refunded if you’re halfway through the policy – some insurers will refund for the unused months, but that’ll depend on their cancellation policy, so read the small print. If you have to pay a fee to cancel one policy but the other insurer won’t charge you anything, that’s another way to save a bit of extra money!
Scour your statements
If you’re not someone who checks all their bank accounts and bills regularly, take a glance at your next statement. You might find that some mystery payments for subscriptions are going out of your account. If so, you may be double-subscribed for services such as tech, deliveries, gaming or streaming.
This might be because you signed up for something – for example Amazon deliveries – with one email address, and then, when you subscribed to Amazon Prime, it was using a different email address. By simply using two email addresses, you might have accidentally created two accounts and could therefore be paying twice for the same service.
You can also uncover duplicate subscriptions by looking at the subscriptions, renewals or payments settings in your Apple, Android, Google accounts etc. This should show you any apps that you’ve subscribed to twice, or any services that have auto-renewed and you haven’t realised.
When you uncover duplicate subscriptions, you can simply cancel the second one and save money in the future while continuing to enjoy the same services you used before. This can be a pain-free way to cut the cost of your monthly bills, so it’s worth doing a bit of admin to save that cash.
Ask your family
And don’t just check your own statements – ask your family what they are paying for too. In some households, it’s likely that multiple family members are paying for the same thing, when you could be grouped together as a family and only pay for one plan that covers you all.
Here are some examples of duplicate payments:
- Paying individual delivery costs on each order from Amazon when you already have a Prime plan and could add other members of the family by linking the accounts.
- Each of you subscribing to an app on your phone, such as Duolingo or Headspace, when you could pay once and add multiple members of your family to a single plan.
- A family member might have accidentally logged into the service you’ve already paid for (such as gaming on Xbox or streaming on ITVX) with a different email address than the one registered, so they believed they needed to take out a new subscription.
- You could save money on streaming if you have individual Netflix, YouTube Premium or Spotify plans by paying a little extra for a household plan that includes multiple members – you’ll all save money overall.
In this instance, you really are paying twice for the same thing if multiple members of your family are subscribing to the same service. So, it makes sense to review your active memberships together and check if you’re paying individually for a subscription that could be combined as a family plan to save money going forward.
Plus, could you stop subscribing altogether to something you rarely use? There are many free music streaming options that could replace your Apple Music or Amazon Music Unlimited. And there are so many free on-demand TV or movie-watching options if you don’t mind seeing the adverts, so you might never need to subscribe to a streaming service again – think of all the money you would save!
I hope these ideas will help you to save money on paying double for the things you need. Let me know in the comments below if you’ve managed to cut the cost of your monthly spending by cancelling duplicate policies or by sharing family subscriptions – I’d love to hear your money-saving hack.
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This article is a sponsored collaboration. The pink links in the content indicate a sponsored link or information source. The blog post reflects my own experience and the sponsor hasn’t had any control over my content 🙂
