Your cards, credit or debit, might be valid for 3-5 years. Most of you will keep them until they near expiry. But it might be a good idea to renew them every year. Why?

To remove the subscriptions you don’t really need, and to block shady businesses that do not let you cancel your subscriptions!

Most banks allow ordering cards for free. Here in Sweden it’s as easy as log in to your bank website and order a new card. After a couple of days, a new card will be sent to your with same PIN code as before. Convenient, right?

You will of course need to update your payment information on every website that you need the membership, but with Chrome/Firefox, that can be done easily.

And now, you can just forget about your unwanted subscriptions, or the ones with shady business that make it very easy to subscribe, but extremely difficult to unsubscribe.

It’s more common than you think, from a less known shop like JustFab https://vimvq1987.com/beware-of-unwanted-subscriptions/ , or a well known entity like, America’s Test Kitchen https://www.americastestkitchen.com/support#change-membership-status

Yeah, right. When you subscribe, it’s as easy as just your name and your – of course – card number. When you want to cancel your membership, you need to call a number, and not only that, they actively make it as confusing as possible https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/comments/ae8qfw/trying_to_cancel_my_americas_test_kitchen_online/

I call the number and there is a 10+ minute wait according to the automated message. Fine, I’ll wait.

A few minutes in and the call just hangs up on me. I’ve called back and it happens again and again at random points (drops 22 seconds into the call, 53 seconds into the call, etc.)

It is not only shady, but illegal practice in many place. I, however, do not have the time or resource to deal with them. The solution? Cancel the card I used with them and then switch to my new card. Problem solved!