Tom and Aisha pay for fourteen subscriptions, £231 a month, £2,772 a year. Four of them nobody in the house uses: £732 a year for nothing. Nobody decided to have fourteen. Each was one yes, by one person.
Tom and Aisha, two children. The households in these Shorts are illustrations built from typical UK figures, not real people, and every number below is worked on the household’s sheet.
What happened
Fourteen. That is how many subscriptions Tom and Aisha were paying for, in a household of two adults and two children, and when they finally looked, nobody could say who had signed up for four of them. Together the 14 cost £231 a month, which over a year comes to £2,772. It was not a figure either of them had ever seen written down.
The list itself was a fairly ordinary mix. There were streaming services, a few apps for the children, two separate cloud storage plans, a gym membership and a magazine. There was also a meal-plan service that had stopped being used back in March but was still taking £19 every month. Going through them one by one, four stood out as things nobody in the house used at all. Between them they cost £61 a month, or £732 over a year. Each had come up in conversation at some point, usually as something they really ought to look at, and each had carried on regardless.
What made the difference was understanding how the situation had arisen. It would be easy to blame carelessness, but that was not what had happened. Nobody in the family had ever decided to have 14 subscriptions. Each one had started as a single yes from a single person, for a perfectly sensible reason at the time. The problem was that no one person was responsible for the list as a whole. Without an owner, the unused ones could survive indefinitely, because every member of the household could reasonably assume someone else was keeping an eye on them.
The fix took about four minutes with a bank statement. For every payment that repeated, they wrote down a name next to it: whose subscription it was. Most lines were claimed straight away. The four that nobody claimed were the leak, and they were cancelled that same evening. Then came the second, smaller change. One person now owns the list. Not the household budget and not anybody’s spending, just the list of recurring payments and the job of knowing what is on it. Nothing else about how the family handles money needed to change.
Ten subscriptions remain, each one with a name attached and a known monthly cost. For any household that suspects the same thing is happening, the test is the one Tom and Aisha used. Go down the statement, find every payment that repeats, and put a name beside each. Whatever is left with no name is the real cost of nobody owning the list, and multiplying it across a year shows exactly how much.
The working
Every figure the Short says, and where it comes from on the household’s sheet.
| The Short says | Figures | Derivation |
|---|---|---|
| fourteen subscriptions / four nobody uses | subs_count = 14; subs_unused_count = 4 | on the sheet |
| seven thousand two hundred | takehome = 7,200 | takehome = tom + aisha |
| two hundred and thirty-one / two thousand seven hundred and seventy-two | subs = 231; subs * 12 | on the sheet |
| sixty-one pounds a month / seven hundred and thirty-two a year | subs_unused = 61; subs_unused * 12 | on the sheet |
The turn
Fourteen subscriptions in a house of four is not a leak; each one was one yes by one person, and nobody owns the list.
The Short
Monday
- The repeating lines with no name beside them, times twelve.
- Then one person owns the list.
In Zeroed
Tom and Aisha’s subscriptions screen found the fourteen lines by itself. Ten remain, with what each costs a month and the total.
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