Find the subscriptions you forgot

A subscription is easy to miss because the charge is small and the name on the statement is often a parent company, not the app you remember. Three months of transactions will show you more than this week's list.

Look at three months, on every card you carry

Open the card or bank app and scroll the last three months. A yearly plan hides if you only look at this month. Write down anything that repeats, and anything with a name you don't recognize. Note the amount, how often it hits, and the last time you actually opened the thing.

If you have a second card, a store card, or a buy-now-pay-later account, do that same pass there. An installment plan (one purchase split into a few payments) is not a subscription, and it is easy to forget while it is still charging.

Check the bills that don't show the app's name

Some charges arrive through a store, so the line on your card just says Apple, Google, or Amazon.

On an iPhone, open Settings, tap your name at the top, then Subscriptions. On Android, open the Play Store, tap your profile picture, then Payments and subscriptions, then Subscriptions. In PayPal, open the gear and look for automatic payments. On Amazon, open Account, then Memberships and subscriptions.

Then search your email for receipt, trial, renews, and membership. A free trial that converted last spring usually left a mail behind. If someone else pays for a family plan you use, it will not be on your card. Ask them what the plan costs and whose account it sits on.

Decide with the year

$12.99 a month is $155.88 a year, before tax, if the price stays put. Put the ones you might keep into the subscription cost worksheet. It adds the monthly total, the yearly bill, and a longer horizon you can edit. Keep a subscription you still open. Cancel one you had forgotten was on.

Cancel inside the service's own account page, and save the confirmation email or a screenshot. If the button is buried, search the company name plus the word cancel. Asking the bank to block the merchant can be a backup when you cannot find the account. Some companies will try the charge again, or move it to another card they have on file, which is why the confirmation is worth keeping.

Look again next month

A plan you cancelled sometimes bills once more, or the trial was on a different card than the one you checked. If a charge comes back, the confirmation is what you send them.

The 30-Day Money Quest spends a few of its days on this same hunt, one short page at a time, if you would rather not do the whole list in one sitting. The worksheet and the quest are for looking. They don't choose the subscriptions for you.