Episode 33: The Subscription Detox You Need

  📍 Welcome to CreativeMind Smart Money, the podcast where creativity and business smarts collide. I’m your host, Samantha Eck, bookkeeper, business coach, and your go to guide for building the creative business of your dreams. Whether it’s mastering your money, streamlining your systems, or growing your business, I’m here to share insights that empower you to thrive.

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You’re listening to the Creative Minds Smart Money Podcast, and today we’re talking all about subscription overload. If you’ve ever seen those Rocket Money commercials, you know exactly what I’m talking about, where they talk about, hey, do you know how much money you’re actually spending every month? And this episode is all about those tricky subscriptions that we sometimes forget to have.

Those 10, 20, 50 subscriptions that add up, and if we’re not careful, quickly drain our business budget. As creative entrepreneurs, we obviously love shiny tools and software. We often have what we call shiny penny syndrome, where we want to look at new things, whether that’s Canva, QuickBooks, Dropbox, all these new AI tools, you name it, But the truth of the matter is, are these subscriptions actually helping or are they just sneaky monthly expenses?

Let’s dig into the truth and figure out how to keep the budget in check, but also find subscriptions that are super valuable.

I’ve never personally paid for a subscription that I didn’t want to keep active. I have always reviewed my subscriptions every month and I use a budgeting tool called YNAB where I put in all my subscriptions and make sure they come out every month and make sure they’re covered.

Because it’s very important to me to see everything like that. But I completely understand that not everybody is like me. And there have been times where I have seen people have doubled the Adobe subscription and not realized they were paying for two of them because they have multiple company emails.

So monthly fees can often feel harmless, but in the long run, they can snowball into something bigger. A lot of the times when you’re not tracking these expenses or are aware of what you have for subscriptions, it can become really overwhelming. It can go from 100 a month to 300 a month to 500 a month because you think that 20 isn’t that much, but the more you subscribe to something, the more it becomes just a lot.

On average, businesses spend about 500 to 1, 000 on subscriptions every single year. And, it depends on the business, but a lot of that is software that is either a yearly or a monthly subscription, and we just don’t realize that, Maybe we didn’t cancel it. Maybe we’re not using it. So oftentimes, even with my own clients, what we do is we do a end of the year strategy call.

We review their subscriptions and we say, Hey, is this still something you want to be using? And it doesn’t just have to be software. It can also be things like insurance or even You know, a subscription to a cleaner for your house, things like that. It can be personal things too that you need to think of, especially if you are a solopreneur.

This doesn’t just apply to your business, it also applies to your personal life. But let’s, get into the context of what we’re talking about here with businesses. Business. Business. So how do we identify subscription overload? A lot of creative business tools that are common are things like design softwares, CRMs, storage platforms, different software like that, things that we really need to build up our business.

Even project management systems. So we could have a photographer paying for Lightroom, Photoshop, and Canva when one of them could do most of the job. And this is actually funny because I saw on threads the other day someone post about that how they had these three different subscriptions, but Canva could do most of it.

So why were they paying so much money for all of these subscriptions? So that’s where we really have to analyze each subscription and write them down in a list and say, what can this one do that this one can’t? And I actually did that last year on threads where I posted all of my subscriptions and said, hey, does anybody see any overlap here?

And they were like, did you know that you could shoot videos in Descript the same as you did with Loom? And that saved me 15 a month. So it might seem small in the long run, but as someone who runs a small business, that can save you a lot of money over time. And I completely understand that we want to have as many deductions as possible so that we can minimize our tax burden, but you shouldn’t be having deductions for things you don’t actually want to pay for.

It’s just not going to help you in the long run. Now we want to understand that when we have all these unused subscriptions, it’s wasted money that we could be using in other areas like marketing, hiring, or even paying yourself. So you might be thinking, Oh yeah, it’s just, it’s just 20, but maybe you’re 20 short to buy that new course you wanted, or you’re 20 short to pay your employee this month.

It’s something that you want to think about. So I just want to make sure that this is very clear. Tracking these subscriptions is so important because if you just buy, buy, buy, buy, buy all these subscriptions and you’re not tracking them, you’re never going to understand or know how much you’re actually using.

spending. You want to be really intentional with every dollar you have that comes into your business, which is one of YNAB’s philosophies. And what I really stand by is that every dollar that you have come in to your business, it’s intentional. So just to explain a little bit of my personal side of things, when we’re talking about YNAB, at the beginning of the month, I get all of my retainers in. And what I’ll do is I’ll parse all of that out. So I’ll make sure my subscriptions are covered. I make sure everybody is paid, including my subcontractors, my independent contractors, everybody like that. to make sure that I’m being intentional with every dollar that comes into my business.

And any money that’s left over, I then decide, okay, am I going to invest this into a course? Am I going to just allow myself to take that money out? Does it need to be set aside for taxes? All that kind of stuff so that I can understand that there is a purpose behind every dollar and there’s not just money floating around.

It’s not meant to be restrictive, it’s meant to show you that every dollar has some sort of value. Once we’ve kind of identified that we might have this problem with these subscriptions, we know that we might have a subscription overload, and we know that we might be overpaying on some of these subscriptions, what we really want to do is perform a subscription overload.

Audit. So if you’ve never tracked these expenses and you’re not sure what they are, the first thing you want to do is review all of your current subscriptions. And you can do that in QuickBooks, you can check your bank and credit card statements, whatever it is, just check for recurring costs. Look at what recurs every month, especially if you have so many that you’ve just forgotten some of them.

And then you want to look at the redundancies or tools that you’re using and make sure that none of them have some sort of overlap. Of course, you can feel free to ask threads like I did. You can ask a bookkeeper, you can ask your OBM, whoever it is, to kind of say, hey, do you know if some of these are overlapping?

If I really need these? And then you can categorize them to must have, nice to have, and probably don’t need this. I’m going to cancel it right now. Obviously, a manual spreadsheet is the best way to track these. You can also do it in CRM software or in software like ClickUp, Notion, things like that. I have mine in, like I said, YNAB, so I don’t really track them in ClickUp because I already know when the subscriptions are coming out and I know the date that I need to have the money by.

There are ways to obviously save money on some of these subscriptions, especially if the tools are essential. So let’s talk about how we can do that. One of the things you might want to do is consider yearly billing for some of these subscriptions just to save a little bit, especially if you can afford it.

If you’re looking at your subscriptions and you’re seeing that you can save 120 by switching to a yearly Canvas subscription, it might be worth it for you to make sure that you have enough money set aside by the time your subscription renews so that you can set up a yearly subscription. The other thing to do is test out free trials before committing.

There are free trials for a reason and a lot of these softwares nowadays offer those free trials for 7, 14, sometimes even 30 days. Take the time to test it out and then put on your calendar the day before it’s set to expire. And if you decide that This software is not for me. Cancel it so that you don’t have any unexpected surprises.

This happens more than you think, and I’ve seen it a ton, where people will get on a free trial, completely forget that they’re on the free trial, and continue to pay for it for months before they realize that they never have actually used that software, but they’re still paying for it. And then the third thing to do is always re evaluate when you have slow seasons.

Because Obviously, every dollar counts during this slow period while you’re waiting for clients to come in or you need that money to stay pretty stable. So analyzing what’s coming out of your bank during these really slow seasons can help you to identify some of these subscriptions that you might not need anymore.

So what did we learn throughout this whole little mini episode? The first thing you’re going to want to do is audit your subscriptions this week, check your expenses and cancel anything that you haven’t used within the past three months. And I’m serious, anything you haven’t used. So if it’s sitting there and you’re paying for it and you’re like, I’m never going to use this, cancel it, get it out of your bank account so that you can save that money.

Consolidate where you can. If you find tools that have overlapping abilities or are doing double duty, cancel them so that you can save on those costs as well. And then set a calendar reminder to review your subscriptions quarterly so you can stay on top of things. And it doesn’t have to be a calendar reminder.

Again, if you’re using a software like Notion or ClickUp or Airtable, whatever it is, set that reminder and make sure that you’re checking in on them.

📍 Subscriptions are kind of like coffee. It’s easy to have too much and not realize the cost until it’s too late. So a little effort up front can save you a lot of money down the line. Remember that every dollar you save is money that you can reinvest into your creative business. A leaner budget just means more freedom to focus on what really matters. If you love this episode, subscribe for more money saving tips for creatives. And if you know someone that could use this episode, make sure to share it with them so that they can check it out too. Otherwise, I hope you guys have another fantastic week and we’ll see you next week. Farewell fellow travelers.