Cutting fixed costs without changing how you live
A two-hour audit of the lines that leave every month — and keep leaving because nobody looks at them again.
By António Avelar Updated 17 August 2026 4 min read
There are two ways to spend less. One requires making better decisions hundreds of times a month, at the supermarket, the café, the checkout page. The other requires making five or six decisions once, and then never again.
The second is obviously better, and it’s the one almost nobody does — because fixed costs are invisible by design. They were authorised once, they leave on their own, and they never ask for your attention again.
Why fixed costs rise by themselves
Nearly every recurring contract has the same shape: a promotional price during the lock-in period, an automatic rise afterwards, and annual inflation-linked increases from then on.
Nobody is deceiving you. It’s simply that the price you agreed to isn’t the price you’re paying. Three years after signing a telecoms bundle, you’re probably €15 to €25 a month above what a new subscription would cost — and nothing happened that would make you notice.
Multiply that across telecoms, insurance, the gym and digital subscriptions, and the gap between what you pay and what the same services cost today is often €60 to €120 a month. That’s €700 to €1,400 a year for not having looked again.
The audit, in order of return
Do this once a year. Two hours, on a Saturday morning, unhurried.
1. List everything that leaves every month
Not from memory — memory fails on exactly the lines that matter. You need the direct debits and recurring card charges from the last three months.
This is where most people give up, because extracting it from a statement is tedious work. Bica identifies recurring charges on its own and shows them together; the forgotten subscriptions guide covers the subscription half in detail. Do not skip the charges the bank makes itself, either — the bank fees guide covers the maintenance commissions and card fees that sit in the same list.
2. Telecoms — almost always the single biggest saving
Call and ask two things: what a new subscription costs for the equivalent bundle, and what they can do about yours.
Customer retention is a department that exists and has margin. Being outside your lock-in period is your only leverage, so check that before calling. Typical saving: €10 to €30 a month.
3. Insurance — comparing is boring and pays well
Car and home policies diverge the most. Insurers price to acquire, then let the policy drift upward at renewal, counting on you not to compare.
Get three quotes for the same cover. Don’t reduce cover to save money — the goal is the same product cheaper, not less protection. Typical saving: €5 to €25 a month. If there’s a mortgage, its two bundled policies are the largest case of this — reading your mortgage statement covers the spread-discount arithmetic.
4. Digital subscriptions — the forgetting category
Streaming, cloud storage, annual software, apps that renewed on their own. The question isn’t “is this useful?” but “did I use it last month?”.
Cancel everything that fails the test. If you miss it, resubscribing takes two minutes — and that resubscription is the only real evidence it was worth paying for.
5. Bank fees
Account maintenance, cards, transfers. Many banks waive fees for salary deposits or a minimum balance, and plenty of people already meet the requirements without ever having asked for the waiver.
What isn’t worth cutting
Two traps.
Cutting cover rather than price. Reducing health cover or raising the car excess saves money today and transfers risk to a future month when you’ll be worse placed to absorb it. That isn’t saving, it’s postponement.
Cutting what holds the rest together. The gym you use three times a week isn’t a fixed cost to optimise. This audit is about overpaying for what you have, not about having less.
What to do with the money freed up
This is the step almost everyone skips, and without it the audit produces nothing.
Cut €80 a month and do nothing else, and that €80 is absorbed by variable spending within six to eight weeks. The pattern expands to fill the available balance, without you deciding anything.
Move the amount out of the account on the day the cut takes effect — an automatic transfer to savings, or a debt payment. The how much to save guide covers why saving first works and saving what’s left doesn’t.
Once a year is enough
This isn’t a habit, it’s maintenance. Put it in the calendar — January works well, since many price increases take effect at the start of the year — and do the full pass.
The rest of the year you don’t need to think about it. That’s the point: fixed costs are the only part of your budget you can solve and then ignore in good conscience.