Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Watch out for Trickle Debt

I have been wary of the new trend that is all to easy to get sucked into, which is to take on a free trial period of something and then lose track of when to cancel, or even the number to cancel it. All too often we get ourselves bogged down if we allow too many of these free trials to get started, without paying attention or noting how or when to cancel them if we find as I all too often do, that I really have not used the service as I thought I would when I initially started it.

This by the way, is what they count on when they start you up this way. Most people do not end up using the services on a repetitive basis as planned originally, but the money coming out on a monthly basis is usually in these cases kept to an amount less than $20 a month, so that in most cases we do not even see it coming out each month, or it hurts so little we do nothing about it.

I recently began to take stock of the number of such transactions I have coming out on a monthly basis and found that I currently have four services that protect me from identity theft, three magazines coming each month that I hardly ever read, and five transactions on my bank statement that I had to call to find out what they were; all under $20 a month but which each month add up to a sizable amount. It's okay if I am using the services, but I and all of us, need to be more mindful of the games companies play to get us started on a slow but steady drain of money from our accounts in almost unnoticeable amounts.

These are times where we should simply be more aware of where our money is coming from and where it is going.