Before anything else, do this exercise on paper, from memory, without looking anything up. Write down every recurring charge that leaves your accounts each month. Rent or mortgage, power, water, phone, internet, insurance, whatever comes to mind. Stop when you run dry, then count the lines.
Almost everybody stops between six and nine. Then they go and read twelve months of statements, and the real number lands somewhere between fourteen and thirty. The difference is not extravagance. It is that a recurring charge, by design, stops asking for your attention after the first one. That is what recurring means. The whole product category is built on the fact that you will not look again.
This matters more than any individual saving, because you cannot negotiate, cancel or downgrade a charge you cannot name. Every dollar this course finds is found in that gap, and the gap closes only one way: you read the statements. Not the app summary, not the category pie chart your bank draws — the actual line items, twelve months of them, on every account and every card.
There is a second reason to go back twelve months rather than one. Annual charges hide from a monthly review perfectly. A domain renewal, a warranty, a membership, a policy that bills once a year: none of them appear in the month you happen to be looking at, and each is often the single largest discretionary line in the whole list. The same is true of the charge that fell off in March and came back in September, which is nearly always a free trial that converted.
The mechanics are ordinary and take about ninety minutes. Export twelve months of transactions from every current account and every card as CSV. Sort by description, not by date, because a recurring charge repeats its description exactly and sorting by description stacks all twelve instances of it in one block you cannot miss. Anything that appears three or more times with the same or near-same amount is a standing order, whether or not you remember agreeing to it.
Then add the charges that never touch a bank statement, because they are the ones people miss twice. Anything billed to a phone account. Anything inside an app store subscription list. Anything deducted from a payroll before the money reaches you — union dues, a supplemental policy, a savings sweep, a parking permit. Anything a partner or an adult child pays from a different account for a shared household service.
Put all of it on one page, largest first. That page is the only artefact this module produces, and every other module in this course operates on it. The worksheet below is that page: eleven columns, one row per charge, and the four columns on the right — last price change, contract end date, published alternative, action — are the ones the rest of the course fills in.
One discipline before you go on. Do not cancel anything yet. The first instinct after a standing-order audit is to cut, and cutting in the first hour is how people cancel the insurance they needed and keep the streaming service they watch. Module 2 sorts the list by what each charge is actually priced on, and several of the biggest lines turn out to be cheaper rather than cancellable. Finish the page first.