Save Money by Finding & Cancelling Those Small, Regular Outgoing Payments

If you are anything like me, sometimes you can get to the end of the month and wonder where all your money has gone. You look around and there’s no big new car or expensive holiday booked so you wonder where it’s all gone wrong!

The first thing you tend to do is look back at your bank account transactions to see if there have been any big purchases that you have forgotten about, and it’s then that you realise that the majority of your money seems to be vanishing due to small, regular, outgoing payments!

So we sat down and looked at all these little payments that were going out and what we could do to curb some of them. Some were obvious ones like up-sold mortgage protection (there’s a claim for mis-sold PPI there I’m sure!) that we’ve been paying for the last 7+ years. Others were small ongoing subscriptions that we just never got around to cancelling. One of which was an ongoing payment to Yahoo! for pop3 mail access which was for an email address that we don’t even use anymore!

It can be quite disappointing when you realise these small payments have been coming out of your account for years on end and you’ve just sort of lived with them. At a time when money is tight for most of us, anything we can do to get the monthly outgoings down and free up more cash for our family is something we should all be looking into seriously.

When we delved a little deeper we found we had numerous direct debits still set up from contracts or agreements we had left or finished ages ago!

Sometimes it can be a bit difficult to cancel payments which is often why these things get left. You will get companies that make it very easy to sign up and a total nightmare to cancel the extra payment. I remember when I was with Sky for our TV package they used to make it very easy to upgrade your TV channels as you could do it online or via the Sky box, but if you wanted to downgrade your package in any way it always required a phone call which is quite off putting for some people.

A lot of small payments don’t even have to be individual ones as it’s like the Sky issue above. Sometimes you upgrade the service you get on something such as your mobile phone contract and a few months later you realise you don’t actually need those things, but it just seems to be too much hassle to ring up to cancel them and so you carry on paying an unnecessary £5 extra a month for insurance for your phone. That 2 year contract you signed up to is now costing you an extra £120 over the 2 years, so sometimes it’s really worth making that phone call.

So next time you get to the end of the month remember to take a look at all the direct debits you have set up on your account and see if any savings can be made!