Those Pesky Recurring Payments

If you're like me you're looking at tightening your financial "belt" right now and cutting down on some unnecessary or overlooked expenses.

I love gathering information and quite often I'll do a trial offer that is free for X number of days before they begin to charge you. And then there are the monthly recurring fee items or subscriptions that I find I no longer need or want. But quite often it's difficult to find the information to cancel them, or worse yet, there seems to be no contact information to be found.

Recently I've figured out two ways of handling these that allow you to keep control and cancel them easily. One is to use a "virtual" credit card number. Most all credit cards offer them for online purchases. You tell them the vendor and the amount and how long you want the virtual number to be good for. So if you tell them 3 months if the vendor tries to put through a charge after 3 months it will be declined and they will get in touch with you. If you still want it you can give them another virtual number or cancel right then.

The other way is to use PayPal to pay for these items. Normally I'm not a fan of PayPal, but I just had a vendor who would only accept PayPal, so I used it for a recurring payment. I just discovered it is very easy to cancel a recurring transaction with them. So two things I tried out for a couple of months and now don't want to continue with were very easy to cancel.