There’s no better place to start a money spring clean than with your bank account. Get a hold of your most recent statement, whether that’s a paper copy of one you can access online. Go through it line by line to make sure that you understand every credit and debit on the statement.
“Why should you have to do that?” I hear you ask. Surely the bank will just pay the debits I ask them to pay, deduct all the items I’ve bought with my debit card and credit my salary or pension or any other money that I have transferred into my account.
Well, in a normal month that is what you would expect to happen, and in the vast majority of cases it is exactly what will happen.
But what about the direct debit you set up for a six-month trial of that new magazine you fancied. Or the free trial for a newspaper that insisted that you gave them your bank details when you set it up. Did you remember to cancel them at the end of the free trial period?
Are you still paying for that gym membership even although you haven’t been allowed to use the gym for a year, or for a satellite TV subscription that you forgot to cancel when you switched to cable a couple of months ago.
What about Netflix or Amazon Prime that you said you would merge with your partner’s account when you moved in together. Are you still paying for two accounts?
The list is almost endless. And quite often it’s not a case of a company trying to rip you off, it’s simply that you’re not on top of your administration and you forget to cancel a mandate when you should have done.
Take the time to do it now. You never know what you might find!
