Gym memberships costing you a fortune? Cancel them.
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Trent Hamm Guest blogger
As I mentioned yesterday, one of the first things Sarah and I did when we began our financial recovery was to start going through all of our regular bills 鈥� monthly bills, annual bills, and everything in between. If it needed to be paid regularly, it was examined.
This included quite a few club membership fees, subscription fees, and gym fees. We had a warehouse club membership. We were members of a local gym. We were members of a food co-op. We had entertainment bills, too, such as Netflix and Gamefly.
All of these monthly and annual bills added up to a lot of money per year. In fact, our membership and subscription bills added up to several months of car payments.
Were they worth it? We had to dig in a little to figure that out.聽
Our first question was聽whether or not we actually聽used聽the membership.聽Did we actually use it, or did we merely hold onto it out of a sense that we聽might聽use it someday?
Take the gym membership. We would use it in bursts, but then life would intervene and we wouldn鈥檛 use it for months. Then, one of us would get some exercise motivation and the membership would be used heavily for a few weeks鈥� and then the usage would disappear again.
What about the warehouse club membership? We lived in a pretty small apartment and, although we did use the service sometimes, we really didn鈥檛 have space to take advantage of bulk buying.
As we mentioned last time, there were several subscription services we didn鈥檛 use, either.
We cut them all.聽Simply put, if you don鈥檛 use a membership or a subscription service聽very聽frequently, it鈥檚 not going to be worth it.
Your cost per hour of use of that membership or service should be approaching $1. If it鈥檚 not, it鈥檚 a financial drain.
That鈥檚 not to say that you should immediately unsubscribe from all memberships that cost you more than $1 per hour, but if it鈥檚 above that level, you should聽strongly consider聽unsubscribing. Give it serious thought and discussion, particularly focusing on whether or not there鈥檚 a low-cost or free replacement.
The lower your monthly bills are, the easier it is to make strong financial progress.
This post is part of a yearlong series called 鈥�365 Ways to Live Cheap (Revisited),鈥� in which I鈥檓 revisiting the entries from my book 鈥�365 Ways to Live Cheap,鈥� which is available聽at Amazon聽and at bookstores everywhere.聽
