Are You Leaking Money? Check Your PayPal Account For Recurring Charges

by Bonnie Boots

PayPal revolutionized the world of internet marketing by making it easy for people to make purchases without revealing their financial details. Without PayPal, it's possible many of us would not be doing business online.

But that ease of use also makes it possible to click the "buy it now" button without much regard for what you're actually agreeing to. And that can lead to money leaks--dollars that drip out of your bank account because you've forgotten about recurring charges.

Internet marketers have eagerly embraced the "recurring charge" through PayPal because it allows them to sell a product for the low, low price of just $10 a month rather than a pricey $120 a year.

Being able to emphasize that lower per-month price has a positive psychological impact on customers, making them much more likely to purchase. And customers like the ability to make pay for big purchases in small increments. So recurring charges--charges that PayPal bills to your credit card month after month after month--offer a lot of advantages.

The downside is that it's all too easy to forget you've agreed to recurring charges and overlook small $7 and $10 charges as they pile up, often for services you subscribed to but no longer want.

The result? A steady drip, drip, drip of dollars leaking out of your bank account. Here's how you monitor those recurring charges and stop the drip of precious dollars.

Go into your PayPal account and look for the tab marked "History." Once you're inside your Account History, click on   "Advanced Search" and in the drop-down menu choose subscriptions." Now do a search for all subscriptions over the past twelve months.

PayPal will deliver a report that details all subscriptions--which are recurring charges-- billing through your account. Each individual item on this list will be identified with "To/From" and also as "Completed," " Cancelled" or "Active."

The items marked "To" and "Active" are the ones that are currently being billed to your credit cards on a recurring basis. Look at these items and determine if the services you're paying for are still important to you.

If you find charges coming from membership sites or subscriptions you no longer have an interest in, click the "cancel subscription" button at the bottom of the page.

Now that you know how easy it is to check out recurring charges in your PayPal account, make a point of doing this every few months. I keep printed instructions of how to do it in the file I use to sort bills. This reminds me to go into my account and check for unwanted charges on a regular basis.

Last month, I was surprised to discover I'd been billed  for a subscription I thought I'd cancelled--and so I had, by writing to the vendor. That vendor had failed to follow through with PayPal, and so for 2 months I'd been billed an unwarranted $10, an amount so small it had slipped right under my radar when I checked my credit card statement.

By going into my PayPal history and searching for subscriptions, I was able to cancel that unwanted service myself, a service that would otherwise have gone on indefinitely leaking $10 a month--$120 a year-- from my bank account.

Just imagine the damage that two, three or more forgotten subscriptions could do to your finances! That's why it's so important to check both your credit card statements and your PayPal history monthly to stop the steady drip, drip, drip of dollars.

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