I was kind of surprised today as I got an e-mail about an annual renewal for a service. The reason I forgot about it is that I just made the large purchase recently and so saving money was more on my mind for the rest of the month for the sake of financial discipline. While it was in a sense a surprise, it wasn’t a big deal as I keep the habit of making sure I always have all of the annual funds at once before subscribing to anything. I can imagine how disruptive these kinds of bills can be for you if you are relying on your monthly pay cheques to pay for these kinds of things.
It’s kind of ironic in some ways too as you would think a person like myself would have like a ton of spreadsheets or something to manage all my bills and expenses where I wouldn’t be surprised like this. For small things like this though I usually find investing in all those tools tend to take up more of my time personally. The only time I feel I do need software per se to manage my finances is if it is say business related.
I could just set everything to auto renewal as well. However, I often find this makes me a little lazy in actually looking at the bills to make sure there are no errors. It’s better to deal with that stuff sooner than later such as only realizing you were overcharged after you get the credit bill as an example.