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Stay on top of magazine renewals

“YOUR NEXT ISSUE WILL BE YOUR LAST ISSUE! IT’S ALARMING BUT TRUE…UNLESS YOU RENEW NOW!”

This message comes plastered to the current issue of Consumer Reports, the widely respected (off and on) self-appointed guardian of consumer interests.

Alarming, indeed, but is it true?

Well, no. My bill isn’t due for another three months. I paid for a one-year subscription in March, 2007. For this “alarming” message to reach me on January 5, it would have been mailed in December, four months before the actual renewal date.

Magazine hustlers—the august Consumer Reports included—rely on the twin probabilities that you don’t recall when you paid and that it’s more trouble than it’s worth for you to dig out your records to find out when you did pay. So you’ll pay a few months early. Each year you pay another month or two or even three early, and guess what-after a very few years, you’ll have paid for an extra subscription. An extra ten thousand $20 subscriptions represents a free $200,000 for the magazine. Sweet, eh?

A couple of years ago I realized my magazine subscriptions were coming due within a month or two of each other, after I had deliberately signed up for each at different times of the year so that I could afford to pay for the subscriptions without straining my budget. A Quicken search revealed that, yea verily, renewal demands were coming months ahead of the actual renewal dates.

If you have Quicken or a similar program, here’s an easy way to keep track of when subscriptions are actually due:

When you pay to renew a subscription, enter the amount you paid and then make another entry for the same month and day, one year in the future (or two or three, depending on your subscription’s length), showing when the renewal is due. For example, the account I use to pay subscriptions shows these entries:

1/7/08: Harper’s due
2/10/08: Scientific American due
2/10/08: Atlantic due
3/6/08: New York Review of Books due
3/6/08: Consumer Reports due
9/1/08: CR Money Advisor due
11/20/08: gift sub for Atlantic due

The reason two subscriptions are due in February and two are due in March—when I would never start two subscriptions in one budget cycle—is that I didn’t realize I was being herded into paying earlier and earlier until the due dates had been pushed forward, closer and closer to the beginning of the year, and finally began to coincide.

Just because a publication’s editorial policy seems sound does not exempt its circulation department from sleaze. Keep your eye on the rascals…no matter how venerable or upstanding the journal’s reputation!

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