Find the subscriptions you forgot you were paying for.

1. Google Play

Anything you subscribed to from inside an Android app is billed here, not by the company whose app it is. On your phone: Play Store → your profile picture → Payments & subscriptions → Subscriptions. On a computer: play.google.com/store/account/subscriptions.

Check the account carefully. If you have two Google accounts on the phone — a personal one and a work one — each has its own subscription list, and the forgotten ones are almost always on the account you no longer use as your default.

2. The App Store

Same idea on iPhone: Settings → your name at the top → Subscriptions. It is worth going through Settings rather than the App Store app, because the list there includes expired ones, and an expired subscription tells you what you signed up for and forgot the first time round.

3. UPI AutoPay mandates

This is the one almost nobody checks, and in India it is where a lot of recurring payments now live. If you have ever tapped "approve" on a UPI mandate — for an OTT plan, a SIP, a gym, an insurance premium — it sits in your UPI app, renewing quietly.

Look under Autopay or Mandates in whichever app you use: Google Pay, PhonePe, Paytm, BHIM or your bank's own. Each app keeps its own list and none of them shows the others, so if you use two apps you need to check both.

4. Card e-mandates, at the bank

Recurring payments taken straight off a debit or credit card are governed by the RBI's e-mandate framework, and it gives you two useful things.

First, a notification at least 24 hours before every debit, by SMS or email, naming the merchant and the amount. That message is the single best audit trail you have — if something is going to charge you next week, you will hear about it the day before. Most people delete these unread. Search for them instead.

Second, an opt-out. You can skip one payment or withdraw the mandate entirely. Banks put this under "manage e-mandates", "standing instructions" or similar in netbanking and in the app. Larger recurring amounts also need you to authenticate each time, so a mandate that has been running silently is by definition a small one — which is exactly why it went unnoticed.

5. Your inbox

Every one of these announces itself in writing before or after it charges you. Search your mail — including Promotions and Spam — for:

• "your subscription" and "subscription renewed"
• "receipt", "invoice", "payment successful"
• "will be charged" and "renews on" — these catch the warnings, which are more useful than the receipts
• "free trial" — the ones that converted are the ones you never decided to buy
• "auto-debit" and "mandate" for the Indian ones

Sort by oldest rather than newest. The subscription you have been paying longest is the one you are least likely to remember starting.

6. The statement, last

Last because it is the slowest, and thorough because nothing escapes it. Pull twelve months of card and account statements and look for the same amount on roughly the same date each month. Twelve months matters: an annual subscription appears exactly once, and it is the annual ones that do the real damage, because a year is long enough to completely forget a decision.

Cancelling it properly

The mistake almost everyone makes: deleting the app does not cancel the subscription. Nor does closing your account with the service, in most cases. Billing lives with whoever takes the money, so cancel where it is billed —

• Subscribed inside an Android app → cancel in Google Play
• Subscribed inside an iPhone app → cancel in App Store subscriptions
• Signed up on a website → cancel on that website, and keep the confirmation mail
• A UPI mandate → revoke it in the UPI app, not just with the merchant
• A card e-mandate → withdraw it at the bank as well as telling the merchant

You usually keep access until the end of the period you have already paid for, so there is no reason to wait until the last day. Cancel when you decide, not when it is about to renew.

Then write down the ones you keep

Cancelling is the satisfying half. The half that stops this happening again is writing down the renewal date of everything you decided to keep — particularly anything annual, and particularly anything that was cheap when you signed up.

A renewal you have seen coming is a decision. A renewal you discover on a statement is just a charge. The difference is a note in a calendar a fortnight ahead. The wider list of things worth that treatment is longer than most people expect.