新湖畔网 （随信APP) | 专栏：付账单还是享受生活——从另一个角度看

Netflix将在11月份首次推出，以每月6.99美元的价格在美国提供基础广告订阅服务

定期账单支付订阅和续订的组合在很大程度上是一个品味问题。很容易注册某个服务，然后发现你的预算又一次一团糟。

这是人与账单的较量，猜猜谁赢了。

有时只是一个时间的问题。比如，你已经完全忘记的某项年度续订与你定期支付的账单同时到期。或者，更有可能的是，同时发生的一系列付款恰好是一个错误的时间点。

人们并不一定是不整洁的。只是很难协调看似随机持续不断的支付。特别是当这些支付和问题似乎以不同形式不断发生时。

订阅是一个很好的例证。价格不仅不断上涨，而且积累成了持续不断的支出。较不明显的问题是，旧订阅可能已经过时了。你不再购买你真正感兴趣的东西。

在这个方程的另一侧是可能有所帮助的事情。你主要是在支持陈旧过时的商业模式和荒谬的成本。

这难道不令人鼓舞吗？数字化最大且最不能被原谅的讽刺之一就是，曾经是偶尔服务的价格如此高涨。数字服务并没有那么昂贵。

有些服务看起来好像是每个电子元收费。有些超级昂贵的课程甚至不需要你起床，...但无论如何你都会被收取那样的钱。

和所有价格上涨一样，附加的成本会实时减少你的金钱价值。

假设你正常的净成本占预算的80%。

剩下的20%可以用来过生活，或者像大多数人一样，假装过生活。

所有的开支通常在6个月内稍微增长。你通常无法保持足够的财务稳定来思考生活。

累积的新成本意味着你的20%现在只有约5%。你现在也许能负担得起谈论生活，但其他方面就算了。

信用会让情况变得更糟糕，通常更糟。

引用每一个直接营销广告，“还有更多！”

不只是你在不断陷入账单和平衡的混乱中。

有时被称为“完全缺乏商业才能”，你的账单人员很可能也会坐以待毙。

资本主义最基本的原则之一是资本必须能够运转。你会说人们的资本每天做100个俯卧撑并跑5英里吗？

不，当然不是。

只是感觉像是。

社会的基本单元现在被持续支出所堵塞。大多数人在不再不断支付任何事物时会感觉好得多。

持续的付款也有另一不良影响——对任何额外付款的厌恶。这对任何人都不是好事。

每日支出使得很难兴奋地考虑为任何事物支付更多。你不能存钱或花钱你没有的钱。你对风险和财务承诺的欲望将会减退且再也不会回来。

然而，我们有什么？价格不断上涨，会厌恶任何人或任何事物。价格上涨带来的价值幻觉是非常明显的。你可以在杂货价格中看到这一点。你现在要看到原价的好几倍。

现在再加上一种愚蠢的向人收费的方式。他们被收费。他们的账户可能没有足够的现金。他们可能受到无法支付的多重成本冲击。

与简单地在明确时间范围内提前支付服务不同，你得到的是这样——一个杂乱无章的混乱，可能需要数天甚至数周才能解决。

在时间和压力方面管理这种混乱可能比账单更花费。

随着成本上升，消费者的信息变得更简单了。 消除所有多余的预算成本。这对那些坚持将收入用于自由支出选项的人来说不是好消息。

你的订阅和其他成本可能会在一次成本削减的疯狂中被杀戮。有关于人们如何试图管理价格的一长串凌乱新闻，情况非常糟糕。

基本原则是：

账单周期正在变成信用卡和信贷提供商的情形。不支付是最可能的结果。

由于多年来疯狂涨价，人们本来也不会有或将来也不会有这笔钱。要么价格降下去，要么收入会更快地减少而出去。当前的价格情况是自毁的。看看有多少账单因为你收集它们的方式而反弹。

Netflix will price its Basic with Ads subscriptions in the United States at $6.99 a month when it debuts in November - Copyright AFP Manjunath Kiran

The mix of regular bill payments subscriptions and renewals is very much a matter of taste. It’s very easy to sign up for something and then find that your budget is yet again in a mess.

It’s people vs bills, and guess who’s winning.

Sometimes it’s just a matter of timing. A yearly renewal for something you’d completely forgotten about hits at the same time as your regular payments, for example. Or, far more likely, a combination of payments at the same time which just happens to be the wrong time.

People aren’t necessarily disorganized. It’s just hard to coordinate with the seemingly almost random constant payments. Particularly when those payments and issues seem to happen all the time in different forms.

Subscriptions are a case in point.  Not only do they constantly rise in price, but they accumulate into a drip of constant debits. A less obvious problem with older subscriptions is that they can go stale. You’re no longer buying something you’re actually interested in.

On the other side of this equation is something that might help. You’re paying paywalls and subs largely to prop up creaky antiquated business models and ridiculous costs.

Isn’t that inspiring? One of the greatest and most inexcusable ironies of digitization is that prices have risen so much for what used to be occasional services. It’s not like digital services are actually all that expensive.

You’d think they were charging dollars per electron for some services. You could do one of those hyper-expensive degree courses without actually needing to get out of bed, …But you get charged that sort of money anyway.

Like all price rises, the added costs effectively devalue your money. in real-time, there and then.

Say your normal net costs were 80% of your budget.

The surviving 20% could be used for having a life, or, like most people, pretending to have one.

All your costs predictably go up a bit over 6 months. You usually can’t get enough financial stability to think about living.

The cumulative new costs mean that your 20% is now about 5%. You can now maybe afford to talk about having a life, but otherwise, forget it.

Credit makes it worse, often a lot worse.

To quote every direct marketing ad ever, “There’s more!”

It’s not just you that’s sinking nobly into a haze of bills and balancing acts.

Due to what is sometimes called “total lack of business talent”, your billers are also very probably settling stern first into insolvency.

One of the most basic principles of capitalism is that capital must be able to operate. Would you say peoples’ capital is doing 100 push-ups and going for a 5 mile jog every day?

No, of course not.

It just feels like it.

The fundamental unit of society is now clogged with constant costs. Most people feel much better when they’re not constantly paying for anything and everything.

Constant payments also have another byproduct – Aversion to more payments of any kind. That’s not good for anyone.

The daily outlay makes it hard to enthuse about more payments for anything. You can’t save or spend money you don’t have. Your appetite for risk and financial commitments will go and never return.

Yet, what do we have? Constant price rises that would disincentivize anyone or anything. The illusion of value in price rises is obvious enough. You can see that in grocery prices. You’re now looking at multiples of the original costs.

Now add to this a stupid way of billing people. They get billed. They may not have the cash in their accounts. They may get hit by multiple costs they can’t cover.

Instead of just doing a “pay upfront for whatever” service over a clear time frame, you get this – A disorganized mess that will probably take days or weeks to sort out.  

Managing the mess, in terms of time and stress, probably costs more than the bills.

The message for consumers is getting simpler as costs rise. Destroy all excess budget costs. That’s not good news for people who insist on nailing their revenue to discretionary spending options.

Your subs and other costs can get massacred in a single binge of cost-cutting. There’s a long untidy list of news about how people try to manage prices, and it’s pretty grim.

The bottom line is this:

Billing periods are turning into credit card and credit provider scenarios. Non-payment is the most likely outcome.

Thanks to all these years of maniacal price gouging, it’s not like people have or will have the money anyway.

Either prices go down or revenue goes down and out a lot faster.  The current situation with prices is suicidal. See how many bills bounce simply because of the way you collect them.