Their card is still being charged for subscriptions

Start with the statements, not the card

Before you cancel anything, gather evidence. You want to see what has been charging and how often. Pull the last few months of statements for every account you can reach: current accounts, credit cards, and any payment service they used. If you can get into their email, search for receipts and renewal notices. That inbox is often the fastest map of what they paid for.

Print the statements or save them to a folder. You will be reading them closely, and it helps to mark them up.

Mark every repeating charge

Go through each statement line by line. Anything that appears on the same date each month, or on the same date each year, is a candidate. Some names are obvious. Many are not: a company name you don't recognize can be a streaming service, a storage unit, a gym, a software plan, or a charity donation. Write each one on a single list with the amount, the date, and the card it came from.

Watch for the small ones. A few dollars a month is easy to skim past, and those are often the ones that run for years.

• Monthly charges on the same date
• Yearly renewals that show once in twelve months
• Free trials that have just turned into paid plans
• Charges that changed amount, which can mean a price rise or an upgrade
• Payments taken by a service like PayPal or a phone wallet rather than the card itself

Decide what to stop and what to keep

Some subscriptions should stop now. Others need to keep running for a while: home insurance, utilities, a phone line you still need, storage for their belongings. Mark each item on your list as stop, keep, or ask. The ask pile is for charges you don't understand yet. Leave those alone until you know what they are.

If two people are handling the estate, agree on who cancels what. Two people cancelling the same account, or one cancelling while the other still needs it, causes avoidable mess.

Cancel in the way each company asks

Most companies let you cancel from the account page or by contacting their support. Some want it in writing. A few make you call. Check the company's current help page for the exact steps, because they change. When you cancel, ask for a confirmation email and keep it. If you cancel by phone, note the date, the name of the person you spoke to, and the reference number.

Where you can get into the account, cancel from inside it. Where you can't, contact support and explain the situation. Many companies have a process for accounts held by someone who has died, and they will tell you what they need.

For anything tied to a platform account, the platform's own help pages explain what happens to the account and any subscriptions attached to it. Work through those before you try to close the payment side.

Use the card as a backstop

Cancelling the card does not cancel the subscriptions. It stops the charges, but the companies may then chase the estate for what they say is owed, and you lose the statement history that told you what was running. Cancel subscriptions first. Then, once the list is clear and the urgent items are handled, deal with the card itself through the bank.

If the card belongs to a joint account, talk to the other account holder before you do anything to it. Their everyday spending may depend on it.

Keep a simple record

Keep one page with each subscription, the date you cancelled, and how. Add the confirmation references. This saves you repeating the work when a charge reappears, and it answers questions from anyone else handling the estate. Check the statements again after a couple of months. A missed renewal will show up there.

If new charges keep arriving from companies you thought you had stopped, contact them again with your cancellation record. Most will put it right.

When the list is empty, you have done the part that was quietly draining the account. The rest of the paperwork can wait for another day.