• Finance
• Roxanne Langley

Recently I have been in a clearing out state of mind and discovered the free storage limit on my iPad was almost maxed out! Time to sort old photos or files no longer needed. One of those projects you put off for a lazy afternoon when you’re watching the Texans and hoping they’ll win! Time to pay attention and take better control! We sign up for new apps or programs based on a free trial, watch out iTunes. The trial period ends, we don’t think about it and several months of $1 here, $3.49 there and before we realize it they add up. This week’s saving tip takes you step by step to check and eliminate iTunes charges from your devices. Many of the same steps will work on your Android phone as well.

Step 1 – let’s determine what you’re being charged. There are a multitude of apps and subscriptions available to us with the simple “fingerprint”. Signing up is too easy. Cancelling can be a bit more confusing and time consuming. 

Here we go! Let’s find, manage and stop the subscriptions first.

Go into your iPhone settings app. It looks like this:

Once in the settings app, click on your name at the top to access your iTunes and the app store.

From that screen, click on “Subscriptions” to see what subscriptions are currently billed to your account or have been charged to you in the past. If you don’t want them, eliminate those subscriptions and iTunes charges!

On your subscription window, you’ll see the monthly amount you are billed for each subscription and the date of your next subscription payment. 

You can delete or edit any subscriptions you have by clicking on them in this view. 

You can also review or change your payment method by clicking on “Payment and Shipping” on the previous Apple ID screen. 

Change or Eliminate iCloud Storage Fees

One other Apple subscription service you may have signed up for that doesn’t appear on this page is storage. If you ever got sick of the constant notification that your storage was full (like I did), you might have bought extra iCloud storage at some point. To edit or delete those charges, you need to navigate to a different screen. 

Go back to your main Apple ID menu and instead of clicking on subscriptions, click on iCloud:

From here, you’ll see a summary of your storage. Click on manage storage just below the breakdown. If you have lots of photos then perhaps now is the time to sort through and either delete or save them in another cloud based storage you may have. If you’re an Amazon Prime member you have a free Amazon Photo cloud storage available.

Then click on Change Storage Plan.

From the following page, you can upgrade or downgrade your storage accordingly. Like app subscriptions, your storage gets automatically billed every month. 

Downgrading or canceling your iCloud storage can be a bit more complicated because you don’t want to lose important data. For best practices on downgrading your iCloud storage plan, this article is very helpful. 

If left unchecked, it’s very easy to rack up a bunch of small monthly iTunes changes without even noticing. I hope this helps you save those dollars and put them toward the things you value.  

What iTunes charges were you surprised to find in your subscriptions?