Free guide · Nine pages · Twenty minutes · No app, no bank connection, no password
Free guide · Haven Smith & Company
Six places your money is hiding.
Find every subscription and recurring charge you are paying for, in twenty minutes. No app. No connecting your bank. No giving anybody a password.
Free · 9 pages · Arrives in about a minute
Twelve months, sorted by amount
3.4
paid subscriptions the average person is carrying
2.6
of those going unused every single month
$26.79
the average monthly cost of the unused ones
Self Financial, March 2026 survey of 1,272 US adults holding at least one paid subscription. That is about $321 a year, and seventy percent of them have been locked into a paid subscription by a free trial they meant to cancel.
Why you could not find it
It was never a willpower problem.
You did not keep paying for those because you are disorganized. You kept paying because the charges are genuinely unreadable, and they are unreadable by design.
Anything you subscribed to inside an app is billed by Apple or Google rather than by the company itself, so it lands on your statement as one lumped payment with no merchant name attached. Anything paid through PayPal shows up as PAYPAL and nothing else. And the annual ones, which are almost always the largest, appear exactly once in twelve months, where they look like an ordinary purchase.
So you open the statement, scan it, nothing jumps out, and you close it. That is the correct response to an unreadable document. The document is the problem, not you.
The part nobody gets right
The order is the whole trick.
Most people start with their bank statements. Statements are the slowest place on this list and the last one you should open.
Work the six places in the order given and the fast ones will have found most of it before you get there. The first place takes thirty seconds. By the time you reach the statements, eight minutes in, you already know what you are looking for, and knowing what you are looking for is the entire reason the slow part becomes fast.
That is the method. Twenty minutes, because of the sequence.
What you are getting
The six places, in order.
Here they are. The guide is the how: the exact menu path on every device, what each place is hiding, and the one detail in each that saves you a phone call later.
01 · 30 sec
The subscription screen on your phone
Most people have never opened it. It holds the charges your statement has no name for.
02 · 1 min
PayPal’s automatic payments
The most overlooked place on the list, and where the oldest ones live.
03 · 2 min
Your saved passwords
You already have a complete inventory of every account you ever opened. You have just never read it as one.
04 · 5 min
Four words in your inbox
Four searches, one at a time. Anything billed on the web leaves a trail, and the trail goes back as far as your inbox does.
05 · 8 min
Your statements, sorted
The slow one, made fast by a step almost nobody takes. This is where most people start, which is the mistake.
06 · 3 min
The television and everything attached to it
Separate billing entirely. A household routinely pays for the same service twice through two different devices.
Free · 9 pages · Arrives in about a minute
Before you open anything
Three rules, and the whole thing works.
01
Do not cancel as you go
Find first, decide later. Canceling mid-hunt is how people stop after fifteen minutes with half a list.
02
Write everything down
Including the ones you are keeping. The page at the back is the point of the exercise. The cancellations are not.
03
Go back twelve months
Not three. Annual renewals are the expensive ones, and they only appear once.
Also in the nine pages
The six places are half of it.
The page at the back
One table: what it is, what it costs, who bills it, keep or cancel. The column people skip is who bills it, and it is the only one that saves you time later.
Canceling, and the ones that fight back
There is no federal click-to-cancel rule in force in the United States right now. The FTC’s rule was struck down in 2025 and is being rewritten. What works instead, including the three-step version that makes a cancellation stick.
The one thing not to cancel in a hurry
Small recurring charities look identical to a forgotten subscription on a statement, and they are not the same thing at all.
Why there is no app in here
There are apps that do all of this in ninety seconds. Page seven is what they cost you, and a rule for deciding the next time anything asks for your banking login.
Page seven
“Give your credentials to the system of record. Never to an intermediary.”
Subscription-finding apps work by connecting to your bank, which means handing over your banking login. Most of them do not even hold that connection themselves. They route it through a separate company you have never heard of and never agreed to. One login, two strangers.
Your bank and your tax software are systems of record. You have a direct relationship with them, they are regulated for that purpose, and they do something you genuinely cannot do without them. An app that finds your subscriptions is an intermediary. It performs in ninety seconds a job you can do in twenty minutes, and the price is permanent access to everything you spend.
That rule will still be true when every one of those apps has been renamed. It is worth more than the list.
Send it over
Twenty minutes, starting now.
Nine pages, free, in your inbox in about a minute. You will also get the weekly email, which is one practical thing about running your digital life. Leave any time, in one click.
Before you hand over an email address
Fair questions.
Do I have to connect my bank to anything?
No, and the guide argues you should not. Nothing in it asks you to install an app, link an account, or give any company a password. That is a deliberate choice and page seven explains it.
I already went through my subscriptions. Is this still useful?
Probably, yes. Almost every purge is a statement review, which is place five of six. The four places before it hold the charges a statement cannot name, and place six catches the same service billed twice through two different devices.
Is this a funnel?
Yes. You get the guide free and you get a weekly email, which is one practical thing about running your digital life. If you ever want the full method, we sell it. If you never do, the guide still works and the unsubscribe link is one click. We would rather say that than pretend otherwise.
How long does it really take?
Nineteen and a half minutes if you work it in the order given. Considerably longer if you cancel as you go, which is why the first rule says not to.
What do I get, and how?
A nine-page PDF, sent to your inbox in about a minute. No account, no login, no app, and the file is yours to keep and print.
Who wrote this
Twenty years inside the systems that bill you.
In October 2008, our founder started her first week of training as a financial planner at the Raymond James headquarters in Tampa, Florida. She was sitting in the company theater when the market crashed. Reading the room, she decided to pivot, and earned a master of science in human factors and systems engineering.
She built her career in financial technology instead. In the decades since, she has been part of building the digital systems we use to run and maintain many aspects of our lives, working in product research and design, fraud prevention, cybersecurity, compliance and privacy at organizations including JPMorgan Chase, Apple, Oracle, and T-Mobile.
Which is how she knows that safe enough to pass an audit is not the same thing as safe. It is also why page seven of a free guide about subscriptions is not really about subscriptions. (It is about who you hand your credentials to, and that question will outlive every app named on the page.)
After the twenty minutes
The money was never the problem.
The reason that money was invisible is not that you were careless. It is that nothing was written down. No record of what you had signed up for, who was billing it, or which email address it was attached to. So it kept charging, quietly, for years.
Subscriptions are the cheapest version of that problem. The same gap is why people cannot get back into their own accounts, why a new phone locks them out, and why a family cannot find anything when they need it most.
Pillar 1
Organize
Know what you have, and keep only what you need.
Pillar 2
Protect
Secure your accounts and know your recovery path.
Pillar 3
Prepare
Make sure the right people can find what matters.
Start with the twenty minutes. The full method, applied to your accounts, your files, your devices and the people who would need them, is The Digital Life Management System.
Six places. Twenty minutes. One page at the end that means you never do this again.
Send me the guideFree · 9 pages · No app, no bank connection, no password
Before you hand over an email address
Fair questions.
Do I have to connect my bank to anything?
No, and the guide argues you should not. Nothing in it asks you to install an app, link an account, or give any company a password. That is a deliberate choice and page seven explains it.
I already went through my subscriptions. Is this still useful?
Probably, yes. Almost every purge is a statement review, which is place five of six. The four places before it hold the charges a statement cannot name, and place six catches the same service billed twice through two different devices.
Is this a funnel?
Yes. You get the guide free and you get a weekly email, which is one practical thing about running your digital life. If you ever want the full method, we sell it. If you never do, the guide still works and the unsubscribe link is one click. We would rather say that than pretend otherwise.
How long does it really take?
Nineteen and a half minutes if you work it in the order given. Considerably longer if you cancel as you go, which is why the first rule says not to.
What do I get, and how?
A nine-page PDF, sent to your inbox in about a minute. No account, no login, no app, and the file is yours to keep and print.
Who wrote this
Twenty years inside the systems that bill you.
In October 2008, our founder started her first week of training as a financial planner at the Raymond James headquarters in Tampa, Florida. She was sitting in the company theater when the market crashed. Reading the room, she decided to pivot, and earned a master of science in human factors and systems engineering.
She built her career in financial technology instead. In the decades since, she has been part of building the digital systems we use to run and maintain many aspects of our lives, working in product research and design, fraud prevention, cybersecurity, compliance and privacy at organizations including JPMorgan Chase, Apple, Oracle, and T-Mobile.
Which is how she knows that safe enough to pass an audit is not the same thing as safe. It is also why page seven of a free guide about subscriptions is not really about subscriptions. (It is about who you hand your credentials to, and that question will outlive every app named on the page.)
After the twenty minutes
The money was never the problem.
The reason that money was invisible is not that you were careless. It is that nothing was written down. No record of what you had signed up for, who was billing it, or which email address it was attached to. So it kept charging, quietly, for years.
Subscriptions are the cheapest version of that problem. The same gap is why people cannot get back into their own accounts, why a new phone locks them out, and why a family cannot find anything when they need it most.
Pillar 1
Organize
Know what you have, and keep only what you need.
Pillar 2
Protect
Secure your accounts and know your recovery path.
Pillar 3
Prepare
Make sure the right people can find what matters.
Start with the twenty minutes. The full method, applied to your accounts, your files, your devices and the people who would need them, is The Digital Life Management System.
Six places. Twenty minutes. One page at the end that means you never do this again.
Send me the guideFree · 9 pages · No app, no bank connection, no password