Trick or Treat for Your Wallet

Coach Natalie

Not all surprises are sweet treats—sometimes our wallets get tricked too! 👻

Trick: What’s one expense that caught you off guard recently?

• A bill that was higher than you expected?
• A subscription that renewed before you remembered to cancel?
• A repair or fee that came out of nowhere?

Treat: On the flip side, what’s one good money surprise you’ve had?

• Maybe you got a refund you weren’t expecting.
• Maybe a bill came in lower than you budgeted for.
• Or maybe you scored a discount or sale just when you needed it.

Share your stories—we want to hear both the spooky “tricks” and the sweet “treats”!

RobWilk

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.

DannyB

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

SRC54

@DannyB Excelent work. Here's mine. All over the place. LOL

August is an anomaly because I did an IRA distribution for our 2nd semester tithe.

SRC54

Trick:

I had a main water line break in August that I had to pay to fix (got bill in September), so that was unplanned.

Treat:

But my wife got a reimbursement from her education service organization that unexpectedly paid off her expenses for the year! It was actually more of a split of excess funds! So that made September look much better than it would have been.

UrsulaA

Trick:

My teenager collided her Nissan Rogue with a parked Tesla Model Y within 2 months of getting her license. I am glad the repair came in below $1,000. She did not dent the Tesla, just scratched it.

Treat:

Tax refund in April, I did not expect this (About $2,000)

DryHeat

Trick:

I ended up in the emergency room in a foreign country and had to have over $1000 worth of medical treatment.

Treat:

My insurance company — which (1) usually allows less than the amount charged for service and then (2) only reimburses a percentage of the allowed amount — reimbursed me for every penny.