Trim
A slew of pundits have observed that we now live in a ‘rental economy’. We no longer buy hard drives; we rent space in the cloud. We don’t buy music or movies; we rent them from Spotify and Netflix. We rent Zipcars by the hour for day trips, rent Citibikes to jet around town, rent rooms from individuals when we travel using Airbnb.
All of which is excellent. We get access to more, while paying less. So much less, in fact, that it’s possible to completely forget that you’re paying at all. You signed up for LinkedIn Premium while you were looking for a job, trialed a Hulu subscription to find an obscure TV show, signed up for Audible to listen to business books while you commute. And though you’ve now stopped doing all of those things, the subscriptions remain, small enough to overlook on your crowded credit card statement. Sure, none of those subscriptions break the bank individually. But, en masse, they add up. Your available balance is dying a death of a thousand cuts.
Enter the very smart Trim, a new free web service that analyzes your credit card and bank statements to pick out recurring subscriptions, then lets you cancel the subscriptions you no longer want with a single click.
It’s the first step in a larger vision, one where a machine-learning software-driven assistant keeps an eye on your personal finances, so you don’t have to. And while I’m excited to see how the company evolves, it’s also more than useful enough in this initial iteration to make it worth your time to quickly sign up.