I Cancelled My Unused Subscriptions. The Money I Saved Paid for a Tesla.

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.

Give gold bugs their due. The yellow metal has been a light in the investing darkness. At a recent $3,406 per troy ounce, it’s up 30% this year, to the envy of stock, bond, and Bitcoin holders. Cash-flow purists will call this a flash in the pan, but they should look again. Over the past 20 years, SPDR Gold Shares , an exchange-traded fund, has surged 630%—85 points more than SPDR S&P 500 , which tracks shares of the biggest U.S. companies.

That isn’t supposed to happen. If businesses couldn’t be expected to outperform an unthinking metal over decades, shareholders would demand that they cease operations and hoard bullion instead. So, what’s going on? If this were gasoline or Nike shoes or Nvidia chips, we would look to supply versus demand. With immutable gold, nearly every ounce that has ever been found is still around somewhere, so price action is mostly about demand. That has been ravenous and broad since 2022.

That year, the U.S. and dozens of allies placed sweeping sanctions on Russia, including its largest banks, and China went on a bullion spree. Its buying has since cooled, but other central banks have stepped in. Perhaps this is unsurprising, in light of a decades-long diversification by finance ministers away from the U.S. dollar, which is down to 57% of foreign reserves from over 70% in 2000. But the recent uptick in gold stockpiling looks to JPMorgan Chase , the world’s largest bullion dealer, like a debasement trade. Investors are nervous about President Donald Trump’s tariffs, his browbeating of the Federal Reserve Chairman over interest rates, and blowout U.S. deficits.

Surging Demand

It isn’t just bankers. Demand among individuals for gold bars and coins has been surging, with some dealers experiencing sporadic shortages. Gold ETFs were bucking the trend, but flows there have turned solidly positive since last summer, including recently in China. All told, there is now an estimated $4 trillion worth of gold held by central banks, and $5 trillion by private investors. Calculated against $260 trillion for all financial assets, including stocks, bonds, cash, and alternatives, that works out to a global gold portfolio allocation of 3.5%, a record.

What’s next? BofA Securities says that central banks have room for much more gold buying, and that China’s insurance companies are likely to dabble, too. RBC Capital Markets analyst Chris Louney says ETFs could drive demand growth from here, especially if angst reigns. “Gold is that asset of last resort…the part of the investing universe that investors really look for when they have a lot of questions elsewhere,” he says.

Russ Koesterich, a portfolio manager for BlackRock , a major player in ETFs including the iShares Gold Trust , says that gold has proven itself as a store of value, and deserves a 2% to 4% weighting for most investors. “I think it’s a tough call to say, ‘Would you chase it here?’ ” he says. “There have been some pullbacks. Those might represent a good opportunity, particularly for people who don’t have any exposure.”

Daniel Major, who covers materials stocks for UBS , points out that gold miners mostly haven’t wrapped themselves in glory in recent years with their dealmaking and asset management. As a result, a major index for the group is trading 30% below pre-Covid levels relative to earnings. UBS increased its 2026 gold price target by 23%, to $3,500 per troy ounce, before gold’s latest lurch higher. Many miners are producing at a cost of $1,200 to $2,000. Major has bumped up earnings estimates across his coverage. “I think we’re gonna see further upward revisions to consensus earnings,” he says. “This is what’s attractive about the gold space right now.”

Major’s favorite gold stocks are Barrick Gold , Newmont , and Endeavour Mining . More on those in a moment. We also have thoughts on how not to buy gold—and what not to expect it to do: Don’t count on it to keep beating stocks long term, or to provide precise short-term protection from inflation spikes and stock swoons. But first, a little history, chemistry, and rules of the yellow brick road.

Flesh of the Gods

The first gold coins of reliable weight and purity featured a lion and bull stamped on the face, and were minted at the order of King Croesus of Lydia, in modern-day Turkey, around 550 B.C. But by then, gold had been used as a show of riches for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians called gold the flesh of the gods, and laid the boy King Tutankhamen to rest in a gold coffin weighing 243 pounds. The Old Testament says that under King Solomon, gold in Jerusalem was as common as stone. Allow for literary license; silicon, an element in most stones, is 28.2% of the Earth’s crust, whereas gold is 0.0000004%.

Marco Polo described palace walls in China covered with gold. Mansa Musa I of Mali in West Africa, on a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, is said to have splashed so much gold around Cairo on the way that he crashed the local price by 20%, and it took 12 years to recover. To Montezuma, the Aztec king whose gold lured Cortés from Spain, the metal was called, as it still is by some in Central Mexico, teocuitlatl —literally, god excrement. Golden eras, gold medals, the Golden Rule, and golden calf—so deep is the historical association between gold and wealth, excellence, and vice that it seems to have a mystical hold on humanity. In fact, it’s more a matter of chemical inevitability.

Trade and savings are easier with money. Pick one for the job from the 118 known elements. Years ago on National Public Radio, Columbia University chemist Sanat Kumar used a process of elimination. Best to avoid elements that are cumbersome gases or liquids at room temperature. Stay away from the highly reactive columns I and II on the periodic table—we can’t have lithium ducats bursting into flame. Money should be rare, unlike zinc, which pennies are made from, but not too rare, unlike iridium, used for aircraft spark plugs. It shouldn’t be poisonous like arsenic or radioactive like radium—that rules out more elements than you might think. Of the handful that are left, eliminate any that weren’t discovered until recent centuries, or whose melting points were too high for early furnaces.

That leaves silver and gold. Silver tarnishes, but rarer, noble gold holds its luster. It is malleable enough to pound into sheets so thin that light will shine through. And, despite the best efforts of Isaac Newton and other would-be alchemists, it cannot be artificially created—profitably, anyhow. Technically, there is something called nuclear transmutation. If you can free a proton from mercury’s nucleus or insert one into platinum’s, you’ll end up with a nucleus with 79 protons, and that’s gold. Scientists did just that more than 80 years ago using mercury and a particle accelerator. But what little gold they produced was radioactive. If you think you can do better, you’ll likely need a nuclear reactor to prove it, but a large gold mine is one-fifth the cost, and we have to believe the permitting is easier.

We passed over copper due to commonness, but it has become too valuable to use for pennies. The 95% copper content of a pre-1982 penny is worth about three cents today. The equivalent amount of silver goes for $3.10, and gold, more than $320. But the three trade in different units. A pound of copper is up 17% this year, at $4.72. Silver and gold are typically quoted per troy ounce, a measure of hazy origin and clear tediousness, which is 9.7% heavier than a regular ounce. A troy ounce of silver is $32.70, up 13% this year.

Some Finer Points

Confused? This won’t help: The purity of investment gold, called its fineness, is measured in either parts per thousand or on a 24-point karat scale. A karat is different from a carat, the gemstone weight, but our friends in the U.K.—who adopted troy ounces in the 15th century—often spell both words with a “c.” Gold bricks like the ones central banks swap are called Good Delivery bars, and weigh 400 troy ounces, give or take, worth more than $1.3 million. If you buy a few, lift with your legs; each weighs a little over 27 regular pounds (as opposed to troy pounds, which, it pains us to note, are 12 troy ounces, not 16).

There are many options for smaller players, like Canadian Maple Leaf coins, which are 24-karat gold; South African Krugerrands, at 22 karats, and alloyed with copper for durability; and Gold American Eagles, 22 karats, with some silver and copper. Proof coins cost extra for their high polish, artistry, and limited runs, and may or may not become collectibles. Humbler-looking bullion coins are bought for their metal value. Prefer the latter if you aren’t a coin hobbyist. Avoid infomercials and stick with high-volume dealers. Even so, markups of 2% to 4% are common. Costco Wholesale , which sells gold in single troy ounce Swiss bars, charges 2%, but often runs out, and limits purchases to two bars per member a day. Factor in the cost of storage and insurance, too.

ETFs are more economical. For example, iShares Gold Trust costs 0.25%, not counting commissions. For long-term holders, as opposed to traders, there is a smaller fund called iShares Gold Trust Micro , which costs 0.09%.

Resist fleeing stocks for gold. The surprisingly long outperformance of gold is mostly a function of its recent run-up. From 1975 through last year, gold turned $1 invested into about $16, versus $348 for U.S. stocks. That starting point has a legal basis. President Franklin Roosevelt largely outlawed private gold ownership in 1933; President Richard Nixon delinked the dollar from gold in 1971; and President Gerald Ford made private ownership legal again at the end of 1974.

Gold has been a so-so inflation hedge over the past half-century, and at times a disappointing one. In 2022, when U.S. inflation peaked at a 40-year high of over 9%, the gold price went nowhere. The problem is that high inflation can prompt a sharp increase in interest rates. “If people can clip a 5% coupon on a T-bill, often they’d prefer to do that than have either a lump of metal or an ETF that doesn’t produce cash flow,” says BlackRock’s Koesterich.

Likewise, while gold has generally offset stock declines this year, it hasn’t always done so in the heat of the moment. Recall tariff “liberation day” early this month, which sent U.S. stocks down close to 11% in three days and pulled gold down nearly 5%. “This isn’t an uncommon scenario,” says RBC’s Louney. “When investors were losing elsewhere in their portfolio, gold was sold as well to cover those losses.”

Our top tip on how gold behaves is this: It doesn’t. People do the behaving, and they are appallingly unreliable. Use bonds as a stock market hedge. If they don’t work, fall back to patience. For inflation protection, think of assets that are a better match than gold for the goods and services that you buy every week. A diversified commodities fund has precious metals but also industrial ones, along with energy and grains. Treasury inflation-protected securities are explicitly linked to the consumer price index, which measures inflation for a theoretical individual whose buying patterns differ from your own, but are close enough.

Own a house. Stick with a workaday, reliable car. Yes, cars deteriorate. But so does nearly everything on a long enough timeline. Rely mostly on stocks, which represent businesses, which wouldn’t endure if they couldn’t turn raw inputs like commodities into something more profitable. There’s even a miner, Newmont, in the S&P 500.

The Case for Mining Stocks

Speaking of which, UBS’ Major recently upgraded both Canada’s Barrick and Denver-based Newmont from Neutral to Buy. “Both very much fall into that category of having a challenging recent track record,” he says. Newmont has lost 20% over the past three years while gold has gained 76%, which Major blames on difficult acquisitions and earnings shortfalls. Barrick, down 8%, has been in a dispute with Mali since 2023, when its government instituted a new mining code that gives it a greater share of profits. In recent days, authorities have shut the company’s offices in the capital city of Bamako over alleged nonpayment of taxes.

These are the sort of headaches that Krugerrands in a safe don’t produce. But Major calls expectations “adequately reset,” free cash flow attractive, and guidance achievable. Newmont, at 13 times next year’s earnings consensus, is selling assets, and Barrick, at 10 times, has healthy production growth.

Major also likes London-based, Toronto-listed Endeavour Mining , up 40% over the past three years and trading at nine times earnings, although he says it has “higher jurisdictional risk.” It is focused on West Africa, especially Burkina Faso, which had a coup d’état in 2022. You’d think the stock would be doing worse amid such political upheaval. Then again, Burkina Faso since 1966 has had eight coups, five coup attempts, and one street ousting of a president who tried to change the constitution to remain in power. That works out to an uprising every four years, on average.

Montezuma’s scatological name for gold might have been prescient, considering the sometimes-odious consequences for small countries that find it.