Find and Remove Unnecessary Recurring Payments With This Virtual Assistant
Most of us are guilty of having subscriptions to services we no longer need or no longer use (or may not even know what we have at all). Sometimes we leave them because it’s the path of least resistance, or because “cancel Ancestry.com” languished at the bottom of our to-do lists for months (guilty). Trim solves this problem and saves you money by detecting all of your active subscriptions and doing the easy job of canceling those you no longer need.
How it works
There is nothing to download here, which is an advantage for your phone memory, and registration is free. Start by creating an account by creating a new username or logging in with Facebook. The main difference between the two types of profiles appears to be in the way Trim communicates with you. If you register with an email address, you can choose to send notifications via Facebook messenger or SMS, and if you register with Facebook, you will automatically become a member of Trim’s Facebook messaging.
Then you connect your bank accounts and credit cards. Analyzing your data takes a few minutes (in my case it took about 3 minutes – I barely had time to top up my coffee).
You will then receive a list of all your recurring payments and the option to close your accounts. It’s not perfect – I got a few one-time purchases on my list, but I was given the option to flag products that weren’t subscriptions so they don’t appear again. It should also be noted that Trim only fetches data for 90 days, so if you have a recurring annual or semi-annual fee it may not be received initially.
If you choose to cancel your subscription, Trim collects the necessary information to process the cancellation for you for a fee. You can avoid being charged for this “premium cancellation service” by sharing their site on Facebook. They will even take on those subscriptions that are especially difficult to cancel, such as gym membership, which usually require registered mail. If you ask me, such a service costs a lot more than posting to Facebook.
You are wondering about security, right?
Trim has an easily accessible and understandable explanation of their security protocols on their home page. They never touch or store your credentials – Plaid’s third-party service (which works with the likes of Stripe, Transferwise, and Venmo) sends your online banking credentials to your bank and sends an encrypted read-only access token back to Trim. They require two-factor authentication for any login to your Trim account from a new device or after your security token expires.
Other Ways Pruning Can Save You Money
Since its first launch in 2015, Trim has added several valuable new features:
- You can choose to receive a text notification if you have a bank transaction for a certain amount or if your bank account has dropped below a certain number.
- If you are a Comcast subscriber, Trim will bargain on your cable TV bill and ask for outage loans.
- Trim Savings offers on-statement credits for Visa purchases at select stores if you agree.
- A beta program called Price Drop will analyze your Amazon spending and notify you when the price drops and automatically send you a save receipt.
Comcast and Amazon programs are not completely free, but you only pay based on what you save (25% of your first month savings on Comcast and 25% of your savings on Amazon), so it’s still a win-win situation.
Trim’s website says there are future plans for paid “high-tech financial advisory services,” but they will always offer a free option. As far as I can tell, it looks like this premium service will be doing things like comparing insurance prices – a task that I, for example, would be more than happy to outsource.
How to crop versus Truebill?
I also tried Truebill , which offers many of the same services, but I preferred Trim. With Truebill, you don’t get a subscription list message, instead you go into the app and scroll through your subscription list to choose what you want to cancel. While Trim notifications created a short-term challenge that was clear – review and cancel what you don’t want – Truebill seems to be aiming for a more permanent relationship with its users, offering push notifications when the score seems higher than usual or any other reason fails. usual.
Truebill does indeed extract information from over 90 days of transactions and was able to get the couple of annual subscriptions I had, which in my case eventually led to the discovery of another unwanted journal subscription. I’ve heard reports that Truebill is more accurate than Trim in defining recurring payments, but I did find several one-time transactions on my list.
Like Trim, Truebill offers additional money-saving suggestions, including making it easier to open investment accounts, finding the best insurance rates, and negotiating a cell phone bill, but unlike Trim, their dashboard offers services you might find useful on based on your data. … While it might sound useful, their analysis of my data was imperfect at best (for example, assuming the semi-annual premium was monthly), and many of the dashboard’s suggestions seemed overwhelming and repulsive. I consider myself a savvy consumer, no stranger to negotiation, and seeing the red flag and “This bill seems high” under each of my utility bills was more judgmental than helpful.