Want to save money on TV streaming services? Become a stream-hopper

You can return at any time. Most services will remember your likes and dislikes and other data for more than six months. Some will even offer you another free trial to come back.

When you cancel, you’re not cut off immediately – if you’ve paid for a month, you’ll be cut off at the end of a month. So you can subscribe and cancel immediately if you’re worried about remembering to do so later. Sometimes they’ll even “pay” you to come back!

I’ve dabbled with both Spotify and Apple Music in the past. In the end, we settled on a Spotify family subscription, but I think both have their strengths.

While researching this, I went back for a closer look at Apple Music and noticed they were offering me ‘one month free’ to come back, even though I’d cancelled in the past. So I took it for the month and decided I’d try them both out again for a while and see which one I preferred. And yes – I did remember to cancel one of them after the free month. I’ve also heard of Netflix offering people a second free trial if they didn’t complete their first one.

In our family of four, we came up with a simple rule to stop our streaming habit from spiralling out of control. I call it the “Pick a Winner” rule. Each member of the family is allowed to pick one streaming service at a time and only one. If we stick to it, we’re signed up for four services at any given time and no more.

In one month, for example, my 10-year-old might pick Stan* for All Blacks games, my 12-year-old might pick Binge for Modern Family, my wife and I might pick Apple TV+ for Ted Lasso and Kayo Sports for the footy. With the footy season winding up, I might cancel Kayo Sports for now and sign up to Netflix for Animal Kingdom, and so on.

Here’s another way to decide which subscriptions to keep and which ones to switch off:

• Draw a line down the middle of a page to create two columns. Call one of them “Angel Subs” and call the other one “Vampire Subs”. Put each of your subscriptions in one column or the other.

• Angels are the subscriptions that save you money, compared with what you’d pay otherwise for renting TV, movies and music on an ad hoc basis. Vampire subscriptions are the ones that cost you money by sucking it out of your direct-debit account without giving you real value in return.

• Then drive a stake through the heart of all the Vampire Subs (or at least the ones you can live without) and cancel them. Don’t worry – you can always come back.

Reviews.org has estimated the cost of streaming over a lifetime at $19,300 and found that cancelling just one service could save you almost $10,000 over time.

This is an edited extract from Easy Money: 7 Steps To Bust Your Bills by Joel Gibson, published by Simon & Schuster, RRP $29.99.

*Stan is owned by Nine, the owner of this masthead.