Best Of

Treat: Income is steady for past 5 months while expenses have consistently declined!

Trick: A subscription renewed before I remembered to cancel — This "normally" wouldn't have happened while using Quicken Simplifi. Still, something happened last May (my fault, sort of) that caused me to lose my history on Quicken Simplifi. A simple example was YouTube Premium on an account I no longer knew how to log in to (which is particularly hard to cancel). As a result, I didn't have my recurring reminders to pre-warn me that I had a subscription (annual) that was about to renew. Good news: In at least one case, I managed to get a refund on that renewal.

Treat: I got many refunds this year I wasn't expecting. I tried hard to get them, but i wasn't counting on them. In short, I must've gotten about $3000-5000 in refunds between mid-August and mid-September (in that time, my debt dropped by more than $7000 even though I had no money in checking/savings to start and just around $2000-2500 in monthly income. Also, A prepaid online newspaper subscription I canceled refunded me $0.14 or something like that (unexpected).

Treat 2: More than one bill came in lower than expected. Two examples included: (1) T-Mobile, where I cancelled a line, and wasn't expecting an adjustment until the following month because I thought they billed a month behind. (2) The first billing of a $12/month subscription came in at only about $8.