I Cancelled My Unused Subscriptions. The Money I Saved Paid for a Tesla.
A close look turned up a car’s worth of savings I didn’t know existed
5 min
My new Tesla was burning a $511 hole in my monthly budget. So I set myself a challenge: Could I cover the cost just by getting rid of cable, Netflix and other subscriptions I didn’t need?
The financially responsible among us might cancel streaming services between seasons of their favourite shows . I tend to add new ones and forget about the old ones, doing my share to support America’s ballooning subscription economy. People pay about $273 a month for subscriptions, which is almost $200 more than they think they do, according to a 2021 survey . (Since then, services like Disney+ and Discovery+ have raised their prices further.)
But I needed to make room for the first car payment in my 41 years. I had taken the family car-shopping when our 2001 Toyota Camry, which we inherited from my wife’s grandmother, started to go. I’m not a car guy and had never once wished I’d owned a Tesla. I booked a demo drive for the Model Y because I thought our kids would get a kick out of it.
The fact that we liked the car was almost as surprising as the fact that it was cheaper than the electric Volvo, Volkswagen and Hyundai options we saw. It felt like a spaceship compared with the Camry, which has 205,000 miles, a broken tape deck and an interior stained with blue and yellow crayon.
Our new monthly payment covered a 12,000-miles-a-year lease with no down payment. Tesla estimated I would save about $100 a month from replacing gas with electric, though I would need to drive (and charge) the car to know for sure. Tesla’s app tracks my estimated savings. For now, that left us with $411 to cut from our other monthly expenses.
My wife was on board. My kids shrugged. I got out my notebook and started making a list.
Cutting the cord
My first stop was my Xfinity bill.
Somehow, it had swelled to $249 a month—basically half the price of the car. In addition to cable and internet, I’d been paying Xfinity for things like a landline because cell service can be spotty in my basement office. So long, landline. After cutting everything but internet, my bill fell to $107. I haven’t dropped a call yet.
Next were the streaming services that I’d been paying for but not watching much. Over the past few years, the only person in the house “watching” Netflix was me. And I wasn’t actually watching it. I was listening to episodes of “Seinfeld” in an earbud when I went to bed. The jokes and the rhythm of their back-and-forths were a pleasant send-off as I fell asleep.
I had joined the growing number of Americans ditching streaming services. I also broke up with BritBox, a streaming service that I’d counted on to watch Agatha Christie’s “Poirot,” as well as Apple TV+. I said goodbye to Hallmark Movies Now, which I’m not ashamed to admit I enjoyed every now and then.
Next up was AT&T .
Paying for cellphone service is like paying the water bill: something I did without protest and never really thought twice about. But I’d started to get curious about the ads I’d been seeing for low-cost services like Boost Mobile and Cricket Wireless. When we agreed to let our 13-year-old son have a phone, part of the deal was that he had to pay for and maintain the account himself. He got a plan with Mint Mobile. It has worked so well for him that we decided to give it a try.
We had been paying AT&T about $128 a month for two lines. Now, we’re paying Mint about $65. If there is a downside to making this move, I have yet to notice it.
I’m still paying for that?
Then my wife and I sat at our dining table going through the last couple months of transactions in our checking account. Seeing how much money we were wasting was painful. We were both paying for subscriptions to Canva, a graphic-design service.
We’ve also been paying for Zoom One Pro, which I probably haven’t used in more than a year. I attempted canceling SiriusXM, but they kept me around by dropping the cost by about $5 a month, which is nice because I have become obsessed with a channel dedicated to country artist and sometimes actor Dwight Yoakam.
Upon further consideration I axed subscriptions to IMDbPro and Encyclopaedia Britannica, which I’m sure I’ve used professionally, but…not for a while. Finally, I cut or got reduced rates on four of my digital subscriptions to news publications. I had been making monthly payments to them more often than I was reading them.
In the end, I was able to cut out about $358 in unnecessary bills and subscriptions. Added to the $100 in estimated gas savings, the cost dropped to $53 for a car we desperately needed.
And since the lease came with six months of free access at Tesla Superchargers, the Tesla app tells me I saved $164 by not pumping gas in January, exceeding the $100 I had estimated. In January at least, my car was free-ish.
“So I love and I hate what you did,” David Bach told me. The author of personal finance books like “Smart Couples Finish Rich” has long preached the merits of cutting out small, fixed expenses. But he’d rather have seen me invest the savings.
“If you’re already a millionaire, go enjoy the Tesla,” he said.
No regrets
It isn’t like we’ve had to revert to our DVD collection to entertain ourselves. We still have Disney+, Hulu, Max, the language-learning service Duolingo and, of course , Spotify. We get three print newspapers delivered and many more digital news subscriptions.
I’m reacquainting myself with some shows on the services I kept, like Billy Bob Thornton’s “Goliath” on Prime Video—featuring an exceptional performance from Dwight Yoakam.
It is possible we’ll start subscribing all over again. Americans resubscribe to about 23% of the larger streaming services they cut within three months. That share rises to over 40% after a year, according to Antenna, a subscription-analytics provider.
I get it. I subscribed to Paramount+ for Super Bowl Sunday (yes, I canceled it the following Tuesday). And I’m tempted to return to Netflix every time I get ready for bed. I still haven’t found a lullaby to replace “Seinfeld,” but at least I am the master of my (financial) domain.
I need something upbeat but not preachy, familiar, but with enough episodes that I don’t get too sick of them. I tried “Bob’s Burgers,” but Louise Belcher’s screams and the high-pitched strumming of the ukulele between scenes kept me awake.
Oh well. Reliable transportation is worth the $511 monthly payment. Come to think of it, that feels a lot like a subscription.
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Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
4 minA sharp technology sell-off has exposed a new anxiety on global markets: whether the enormous borrowing behind the artificial-intelligence infrastructure boom can generate sufficient returns as interest rates rise and Chinese competition intensifies.
The artificial-intelligence investment boom has powered technology shares, semiconductor manufacturers and data-centre operators to extraordinary heights. Last week, investors were given a reminder that much of this expansion is being built with borrowed money.
The technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 4.5 per cent over the week ended October 16, its weakest performance since late June. Semiconductor shares suffered an even deeper correction, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index losing about 11.4 per cent.
The selling spread quickly through global markets. Micron Technology fell 14.6 per cent over the week, while South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix dropped approximately 18 per cent and 24 per cent respectively.
This was more than a routine bout of profit-taking. Investors were reassessing three interconnected risks: higher interest rates, the rapidly expanding debt burden attached to AI infrastructure and the prospect of stronger competition from Chinese memory-chip manufacturers.
The debt behind the AI build-out
Artificial intelligence requires a physical infrastructure network of enormous scale. Data centres must be built, advanced processors purchased, power supplies secured and cooling systems installed before customers begin generating meaningful revenue from them.
Technology companies are increasingly supplementing their own cash with corporate bonds, syndicated loans, equipment leases, private credit and project-level financing.
JPMorgan describes the emerging funding model as a combination of conventional corporate borrowing and project finance tied to individual data-centre assets. In Australia, the Reserve Bank estimates that syndicated loans accounted for approximately three-quarters of data-centre financing during 2025 and 2026 to date.
The numbers are becoming large enough to affect broader credit markets. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has cited Wall Street estimates suggesting AI-related investment-grade bond issuance could approach US$300 billion in 2026 alone.
That borrowing is not automatically problematic. Debt can be an efficient way to finance long-lived infrastructure when future revenue is sufficiently predictable. The concern is that AI technology, customer demand and computing economics are changing much faster than the repayment schedules attached to the assets.
A data centre financed today may carry debt for years. Investors must therefore make assumptions about future utilisation rates, electricity prices, chip performance, customer concentration and the amount businesses will ultimately pay for AI computing.
When interest rates rise, those assumptions become less forgiving.
Inflation changes the calculation
September’s US inflation data intensified the pressure. Consumer prices increased 3.7 per cent over the year, ahead of market expectations and up from 3.4 per cent in August.
The hotter reading reduced confidence that interest rates would fall quickly and pushed bond yields higher. That matters particularly for companies whose valuations depend on profits expected well into the future, as well as highly leveraged infrastructure operators that may need to refinance.
CoreWeave has emerged as a closely watched test case. The specialist cloud-computing company has accumulated substantial debt and lease obligations to build AI capacity, while relying on a concentrated group of large technology customers.
Its shares fell sharply during the sell-off, while the cost of insuring its debt against default climbed. CoreWeave has argued that its contracted backlog more than covers its obligations and that financial markets do not always understand its business model. Nevertheless, its securities have become a proxy for investor confidence in debt-funded AI infrastructure.
Oracle, another major investor in AI computing capacity, fell 8.8 per cent in Friday trading, while CoreWeave dropped 15.5 per cent.
The question is shifting from how much AI infrastructure can be built to how profitably it can be operated.
China adds another source of pressure
Interest rates were not the only catalyst. Reports of advances by Chinese memory-chip producer ChangXin Memory Technologies raised concerns that lower-cost Chinese products could increase competition across the global semiconductor industry.
Memory chips are essential to AI systems, but the industry is historically cyclical. Periods of tight supply and high pricing can encourage rapid investment, eventually producing oversupply and falling margins.
The prospect of a well-funded Chinese competitor expanding its technological capabilities unsettled investors in Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. It also demonstrated that AI-related demand does not insulate chipmakers from conventional competitive pressures.
That combination—slower rate cuts, more expensive financing and potentially cheaper supply—challenged the assumption that every company exposed to AI would enjoy continually expanding margins.
A reset rather than the end of the boom
The sell-off does not establish that the AI boom is ending. Demand for computing power remains strong, the largest technology companies continue to generate formidable cash flows and many infrastructure projects are backed by long-term customer contracts.
What has changed is the market’s willingness to overlook the price and financing structure of that growth.
The most resilient companies are likely to be those able to fund investment from operating cash flow, secure long-duration customers and demonstrate that new capacity will earn returns comfortably above its financing costs.
More speculative operators may face greater scrutiny, particularly where debt is expensive, customers are concentrated or expected revenue depends on demand that has not yet materialised.
For Australian investors, the lesson extends beyond US technology shares. Local data-centre operators, infrastructure funds, electricity suppliers and property groups are increasingly exposed to the same investment cycle.
Artificial intelligence may remain one of the defining growth themes of the decade. But last week’s correction showed that enthusiasm for the technology does not eliminate financial discipline.
The next stage of the AI boom will be judged not only by computing power, model performance or demand for chips, but by something more traditional: whether the assets being financed can generate enough cash to repay the money borrowed to build them.
Fact box
Nasdaq Composite: Down 4.5 per cent for the week ended October 16, 2026
Philadelphia Semiconductor Index: Down approximately 11.4 per cent
Micron Technology: Down approximately 14.6 per cent
Samsung Electronics: Down approximately 18 per cent
SK Hynix: Down approximately 24 per cent
US September inflation: 3.7 per cent annually
Estimated 2026 AI-related investment-grade issuance: Approximately US$300 billion
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