We’ve all been there. You go to a website for a free trial, and they require you to enter a credit card number to access your free trial. And then you mark that on your calendar because you know you’re going to cancel this before it hits, but you forget.
You see the credit card charge, cross your statement, or ping you on your phone. And you say, “Ugh, I forgot to cancel it.” Well, there is a better way. Check out your credit cards for a virtual credit card option. We use a service called Relay for our banking, and it offers to set up virtual credit card numbers that we can use for each subscription. If we want, we can place limits on how much can be charged to that card. So I have a general subscription card set up that I use on any of these where I need to get a free trial.
And it has a dollar as the maximum charge limit that I can use. So when it authorizes to find out if indeed that is a real card, it usually goes through. Now, if they try to authorize the amount of what the first charge would be, I may have to go in and make an adjustment temporarily to get it authorized, but then I change it back to a dollar. So the maximum that could be charged on that card in any transaction is $1.
So if I do forget to cancel that, I will typically get an email saying, “Hey, your credit card was denied. Please go in and update your credit card to continue your subscription.” I can pop back in and cancel that if I haven’t already. And I don’t have to worry about trying to get a refund from the vendor.
Sometimes that can be a sticking point. Other times, vendors are easy to deal with and will do that, but it’s still a hassle, so this stops all of that. So check out your credit cards and see if they have virtual cards. You can also use this, as I said, to limit the amount that they could charge you. So if you don’t want it to charge you more when they change out plans or update their pricing without you knowing it, you can control that. So hope that helps you make sure that you’re not dealing with miscellaneous extra charges on your credit card.
I’m Donna Bordeaux from Calculated Moves. Please follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Check out our blogs and our websites from the link below. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell to be notified when we post. To contact me, email me at donna@calculatedmoves.com.
Donna Bordeaux, CPA with Calculated Moves
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