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Companies Must Let Customers Cancel Subscriptions Online, California Law Says (cnet.com)

A California law that went into effect July 1 is aimed at making it easier for customers to cancel their subscriptions online. From a report: The law states that customers who accept an automatic renewal or continuous service offer online must be able to cancel the service online. That could include a pre-written "termination email" provided by the company that can be sent by the consumer without the need for more information. The law means you won't have to make anymore phone calls to obscure customer service hotlines to cancel services like news subscriptions, music streaming or meal plans, for example. One person tweeted about trying to cancel a New York Times subscription on the phone and being put on hold for 15 minutes -- twice.

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  1. Free advice for CRE!MER by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    You read WSJ so that you can soak in a little bit of financial jargon to use in your Serious Business role playing sessions. A guy who has to save for a month in order to get a $100 video card shouldn't be spending $10-$20 a month for content you could pirate right along with whatever you keep on your NAS.

    You could similarly save money by ditching your 60/mo iphone through sprint. iPhones have barely changed in the past 3 generations so you could switch your plan to Boost since you rarely commute off bus lines where your signal is likely to be good anyhow. You could be paying like $14/mo for phone service and you'd never run out of data if you pre-load your large content over wifi and use a mobile accelerator like google, opera, and other companies offer for free.

    Wow an extra 70 dollars a month just like that! You could use that to buy an electric moka pot, electric timer, sugar free vanilla flavoring and a can of condensed milk and always have coffee first thing in the morning. Saving yourself the daily time and money you dump at starbucks. 20 extra minutes in bed and another easy 80 dollars.

    Now if you dump that extra 150 into your credit cards you'll save thousands in the upcoming years! But the best would be selling off underperforming investments right now!!! You can then re-invest whatever the principal payment was on your credit card, pocket the interest payment and still come out ahead on your investments. The interest is at least another easy 20 dollars a month for doing nothing.

    Imagine!! 170 extra dollars of spending cash a month! Nearly 6 dollars a day! 2040 dollars a year! It's half your bonus from last year.

    Now that your credit cards are paid off you can probably qualify for at least a 1% cash back rewards card to put all of your purchases on , and a high interest savings account that is only used to store your direct deposit, hold at least one emergency paycheck, and pay off the entire monthly balance of your credit card! Now you're looking at 2500 extra dollars a year not even counting all the extra monthly investments that would normally be going to the principal on your credit cards.

    208 extra dollars a month!

    If you post all your bills I'll be happy to do it for everything. I know how you could probably slash your bill with dreamhost in half. I can probably reduce most of your bills in some way or another. Come on dude it's free help and it's up to you to decide what is worthwhile. I wouldn't be surprised if I could save you 400 a month. I'll write you up a whole budget with current expenses, reasonable alternatives and the lowest possible alternative and how it will change your expenses.
    It's fun I have it all wired up for myself I'll research your expenses and make one for you.