Unsubscribe me!

• NOT LONG AGO I WAS SWIPING FRANTICALLY ON TINDER WHEN I ACCIDENTALLY SWIPED LEFT ON THE ONE.

‘Come back to me,’ I whispered. Fortunately there’s Tinder Plus, which lets you rewind a left swipe for just R140 a month. I signed up, intending to cancel immediately. Instead, after un-swiping the guy and spending an hour figuring out who he looked like (a young John Lithgow), I completely forgot to go back and opt out. A few months later, I started dating someone else (the real John Lithgow!) and deleted the app, but the charges continued. I thought I could outwit Tinder, but Tinder outwitted me. Try counting up all the subscriptions you pay for – the monthly charges siphoned from your bank account to provide everything from TV streaming to meal prep to storage space on the cloud. Now comb through your account and see what the real total is. A recent survey found that people spend more than twice as much on subscriptions as they think they do. The average initial estimate was R1 000 per month.

The actual average was a whopping R3 245 per month.

It’s not hard to see why people underestimate that number. When companies uncouple your payment from your enjoyment of their product, it’s easy to forget you ever paid. (Why go out to a movie when you could stay home and watch Netflix for ‘free’?) Some charges are low enough you barely notice them, like R14 per month for extra iCloud storage, which I’m pretty sure just backs up unused selfies and bad sunset pics. Your brain does a simple, unconscious calculation with a charge that small: R14 isn’t worth the time and effort it would take to figure out how to not pay it. But something had to change.

So I decided to start hacking at the kudzu of my subscriptions using the unmerciful techniques of home-cleaning goddess Marie Kondo. I purged everything that didn’t ‘bring me joy’. I looked deep into my soul and decided I could tolerate some Spotify ads if it meant an extra R60 a month. I entreated a few friends to join me in a streaming coven, and we shared our Netflix and Showmax passwords. (Behold the modern family.) Another thing: while signing up is always easy, unsubscribing can be hard. They’ll add extra hurdles like making you email with an actual human to ‘review’ your cancellation. But by the end of my purge, I had cut over R2 800 per month.

Some subscriptions continue to bring me joy. Kringle of the Month Club – which sends me a giant flaky pastry 12 times a year – isn’t exactly necessary, but the pleasure each Kringle brings is worth far more than R375. (Certain magazine subscriptions, too, continue to bring me joy. Wink, wink.) A subscription-free existence in this economy would be near impossible – a life without Game of Thrones is no life at all. So I’ve got a new rule: if I haven’t used a subscription in a month, I unsubscribe. Simple as that. As for those annoyingly minuscule charges you’ll pay in perpetuity? Well, that just might be the cost of being alive in the 21st century. –