Check (and cancel) your app and TV subscriptions in the new year

It's a new year, which means it's the perfect time to check in on the money you spend.

TV and movie services, Patreon, in-app purchases, yoga programs, learning apps — our bills are a bit more complicated now than they have been in recent years. After you've finished your new year's celebrations, consider doing something for your financial health: Checking up on your monthly and weekly subscriptions.

I've made it a habit to check these money-sinks every year to make sure that the money I'm sending out is still being wisely spent: Maybe I signed up for a yoga program I'm no longer interested in; maybe that HBO Now subscription isn't really worth keeping when Game of Thrones is offline.

Best of all, checking your subscriptions is (largely) pretty easy and quick to do! Here's how to go about it.

How to check and cancel your app subscriptions

The easiest way to check your app subscriptions is from your iPhone or iPad, though you can also go through iTunes on your Mac.

1. Open the App Store app.
2. Tap on your Profile Photo in the upper right corner.
3. Authorize your account (via password, Touch ID, or Face ID).

4. Scroll down and tap on the Subscriptions entry.

   

Here, you can view all currently active and past subscriptions.

• If a subscription is active, you'll see "Renews [date]" under the subscription type.
• If a subscription has been cancelled, but still has time remaining, you'll see "Expires [date]" under the subscription type.
• If a subscription has expired entirely, it will live at the bottom of the screen, under "Expired". You can renew expired subscriptions at any time by tapping on the subscription and choosing a new plan.

More on canceling an app subscription:

How to cancel an App Store subscription

How to check for other subscriptions

App Store subscriptions aren't the only options you might have picked up in the last year — there are also gaming platform subscriptions, movie services, pledge services, and the like.

It's a little trickier to check for all of these services, but there are a few ways to make it simpler.

Option 1: Check your credit card statement

I try and make sure all my bills are tied to one specific credit card — one that doesn't have many other charges on it — so I can easily see what I'm paying for every month. If you have your expenses spread out across multiple accounts, consider consolidating them: It makes checking your costs and subscriptions that much easier.

Option 2: Use a finances tool like Mint

If you only have a single card or you've jumbled your subscriptions across multiple cards, apps and services like Intuit's Mint can help automatically categorize monthly and yearly recurring expenses, so you can easily see where your cash is going every month.

Once you've set up an account with Mint, you can categorize reoccurring bills and label expenses with tags to find them more easily in the future.

What are your favorite tech things to do after New Year's day?


Let me know in the comments.