Helpful Hints from joeeze: A better way to keep track of your magazine subscriptions

Since forever I've subscribed to tons of magazines — over the years the players have changed but the game remains the same.

A long, long time ago, in a century far away when I was living on the Left Coast, I got annoyed by constant letters telling me it was time to renew.

The thing that made my pot boil over was that never did the subscription renewal paperwork indicate precisely when my subscription expired.

For that, I had to find a label on the magazine or, many times, wait until the next issue arrived, then remember to look at the label on the plastic wrapper for the expiry date.

Very subscriber-unfriendly, especially when you finally find the expiration date and it turns out to be in six months.

Even worse was renewing, then not remembering whether I'd already done it or not, then just to be sure going ahead and renewing only to find months later that I'd already done it.

What is the sound of money going down the drain?

This minor but persistent annoyance went on for years until one day, I decided to try something different.

I took a piece of 8" x 11" yellow legal paper and listed in four columns the names of my magazines, expiration dates, renewal dates, and check numbers for the renewals in case I wanted/needed documentation.

At first the list was necessarily incomplete as the renewal details were lost in time, at least to the extent that the effort required to go back through checkbook registers, etc. wasn't worth the reward.

But over the years the list gradually filled in and as time passed, I began to enjoy the pleasant satisfaction of knowing that the entreaty to renew now, my subscription's about to expire, blah blah blah was only that — blather.

And at least once a year I saved myself from renewing the same subscription a second time.

One improvement was moving to pencil as my medium instead of ink, so that each time I renewed I could simply erase the last entries instead of creating a crazy quilt of arrows and dates and numbers written above, below and to the sides of previous ones.