A Charge I Forgot I Had

Dear friend,

A charge for $14.99 hit my card on the third of the month, three days after rent went out. I did not see it until I opened my banking app to check what was left after both payments cleared. It was for a photo-editing app I stopped using back in June. So today's letter says one thing. You are allowed to notice money leaving your account without doing anything about it yet.

I run an Etsy shop, mostly art prints and a handful of custom pet portraits. My software bill runs $61 a month, split across four apps. I actually open two of them. The other two take their $14.99 and $9.99 every month, the same week the bigger bills clear, right when I am least likely to be checking. That is the whole trick of it. A charge this small never shows up next to a $1,400 rent payment. It sits quietly in the shadow the big number casts.

I am not telling you to cancel anything today. I looked at one exact figure, on one exact date, and that is as far as this letter goes.

Here is the pattern once I finally looked for it. Rent leaves my account on the first. The $14.99 leaves on the third. Every month, same two days, three days apart, for eleven months. I never noticed the second charge because I am usually not looking at my bank app on the third. I am packing orders.

That week I had nine orders to get out: bubble mailers, labels printed at the library because my printer eats ink at $30 a cartridge, a walk to the mailbox before the four o'clock pickup. Nine orders is a little over three hours of packing, spread across two afternoons. A $14.99 charge does not stand a chance against three hours of tape and labels. It just goes through, quiet, on schedule, while I am somewhere else. My phone buzzes with shipping alerts most of that afternoon, and every buzz looks the same as a bank alert until I actually check it.

I want to be clear about what today's letter is asking, because it is smaller than it sounds. I am not asking you to open a spreadsheet or cancel the app you forgot about. I looked at the $14.99 once, said its name out loud in my kitchen, and closed the app again. Nothing changed in my account that day. Something changed in what I knew about it. A leak like this is not a moral failing. It is just a subscription running on autopilot while I ran on mine.

That is the whole difference between a leak you have found and one you have not. Found or not, the money still leaves. But only one version means you saw it go. Here is the sentence I used to say about mine, and the one I am saying instead.

I am not giving you homework today. No spreadsheet, no cancellation list, no total to add up before bed. If I asked you to fix four subscriptions before dinner, this would be one more chore wearing a manifestation hashtag, and you have enough chores.

What you are allowed to do today is open the app once. Look at one charge. Say the number to yourself, the actual number, not a rounded one. $14.99, or whatever yours is. Then close the app. You do not owe the number an explanation and you do not owe it a plan by tonight.

I still have not canceled mine. I looked at it on Tuesday and I am telling you about it on Wednesday, which means two days passed with nothing fixed and one thing known. That is not failure. That is the order this actually happens in for real people with real orders to pack.

The money you cannot see is not gone, it is just unseen, and unseen is the part you get to change first.

P.S. I still have not canceled the photo app. I opened it again last night to look at old edits and forgot why I was annoyed at it in the first place. It is still $14.99. I have not fixed that yet either.

Keep the door open,

MONEY MAGNET