Nothing triggers the frugal accountant in me like seeing a payment notification for a streaming service we didn’t log into that month. Having a kid has naturally meant our time to stare at the glass rectangle on the wall has gone down significantly, and with it our need to subscribe to all these services.
We used to get home, throw dinner in the oven and watch something together, maybe two somethings. Now we get home and the bedtime routine kicks in. We walk in the door and immediately start getting dinner ready. We try to eat together, which usually turns into a series of performances to get those last few bites down. We might start with reading a book, then move onto interesting distracting objects, and by the end we are blowing bubbles while the dog tries to bite them.
Sometimes it’s a delight, sometimes it’s a circus, but by the time it’s all said and done we might have an hour of downtime before our own bedtime routine needs to kick in. No binge watching happening here.
We don’t pay for a TV package or cable in our home, but we do subscribe to multiple streaming services. Netflix, Disney+, HBO, Apple TV, Paramount Plus, Amazon Prime, YouTube Premium. It’s a lot. A never ending stream of content being funneled our way. We are wasting money on subscriptions we don’t always use. So we decided to try an experiment. It was time to let one of them go.
We had just paid for a yearly subscription for Disney+, so it was too late to let that one go and I may need to watch The Devil Wears Prada 2. in a few months.
Apple TV comes bundled with our other Apple services and I need the cloud storage for the five business ideas I’m simultaneously working on.
We only have Paramount Plus to watch Survivor and cancel it as soon as the season ends - can’t miss Season 50!
Our Prime subscription is more about free fast shipping than Beast Games so it doesn’t matter much that we rarely watch it.
We signed up for HBO Go / HBO Now / HBO Max / Max / HBO Max again??? when they were desperate for subscribers and locked in a great rate where we barely pay anything for it.
So that leaves Netflix and YouTube Premium on the chopping block. If you are not paying for YouTube Premium and suffering through all those ads today you are a patron saint of patience. Once you stop watching ads, it’s very hard to tolerate them ever again. My MKBHD, and our Mr Beast and Ryan Trahan viewing must remain sacred. YouTube stays.
So Netflix got chopped. We weren’t watching anything in particular on Netflix, the movies and series we had watched more recently felt formulaic and forgettable. It didn’t feel like a big sacrifice.
I wasn’t sure it would last that long. But after five months we’ve barely noticed it’s been gone. We missed Stranger Things and even that couldn’t get us to sign back up. There is still way too much content to watch on the services we currently subscribe to.
That doesn’t mean we will never subscribe to Netflix again, I still want to see what happened to the girl that keeps getting nose bleeds but doesn’t carry around any wet wipes. But it has made me think that using a subscription-rotation makes more sense than subscribing to them all at once. $15 to $20 a month may sound small but when you’re paying that for five subscriptions you don’t use over a year it can add up to a plane ticket!
Take it from your columnist accountant, use five minutes today and cancel a subscription to a service you never use. You could use that money for much better things, like supporting this column instead.