Piranhas are those sneaky little monthly subscriptions that you take out and as time goes by you have a whole shoal of them nibbling away at your money.
What are my Piranhas
When I did my Getting to Grips With My Outgoings budgeting a few things jumped out at me that I need to tackle. The obvious ones are the biggies like food shopping and discretionary spending but there are quite a few little things that I pay for monthly that I want to kill off, namely:
TV Streaming Services – £386.66/$478.49 p/a
- Now TV
- Amazon Prime
- Apple TV
- Disney+
Recurring Software/Online storage – £99.88/$123.73 p/a
- Apple iCloud
- Microsoft 365
Dog Walker – £576/$713.59 p/a
That’s a potential total saving of just over £1,000 p/a. Not huge, but better in my pocket than not.
What are your Piranhas?
So go through those bank accounts and see what things are regularly going out on a monthly basis. Write them all down, work out what they are costing you annually and then work out which ones you really need and zap the rest.
Some Notes
TV Streaming Services
Cancelling the TV streaming services was easy, you simply log in and cancel your account.
Recurring Software/Online storage
These were a lot trickier to cancel.
Office 365 – The only thing we use this for is Word & Excel. Both MAFF and I have Macbooks and these come with ‘free’ Apple equivalents, we also use Google Docs, Sheets etc. instead.
I can live without Word & Excel but MAFF works for businesses that use them and I think she is going to have some compatibility issues. Time will tell.
Apple iCloud – This one was painful. You get 5Gb free storage but we paid for extra years ago because it automatically backs up the photos on your phone (and we have more than 5Gb of those). So I ended up backing up all the photos from both phones to an external hard drive, which is then backed up again to a different device and then I cancelled iCloud.
Dog Walker
This one was easy as it was just laziness on our part to have a dog walker 1 day a week. So instead of walking the dogs 13 times a week, we now walk them 14 times a week. No big deal.