Things you forget to renew every year

The DVLA stopped posting paper MOT reminders in 2012. They send an email or a text now, if you’ve signed up for one. Most people haven’t. Most people find out their MOT has lapsed on the morning they go to fill up the car, glance at the tax disc holder that no longer holds a tax disc, and feel a small, specific kind of dread.

This post is about the quiet list. The things that need renewing every year, that almost nobody remembers without being prompted, and that mostly don’t remind you until it’s too late to be useful.

The ones that cost you money if you forget

Home insurance auto-renews, usually, at whatever price the insurer has decided to charge you this year. Which is almost always higher than the price a new customer would pay. If you don’t check the renewal email, you’re opting into loyalty tax. The average difference between a renewal quote and a new quote, depending on which comparison site you ask, is somewhere between 40 and 120 pounds a year. It adds up.

Car insurance is the same shape. It renews. The price goes up. You don’t notice. A few years go by and you’re paying nearly double what you would if you switched.

Breakdown cover is the same pattern again. The AA and RAC lean heavily on auto-renewal. The price you joined at is almost never the price you’re paying now.

The ones that are actually legally required

MOTs don’t auto-renew. You just have to know. If you drive without one, your insurance is void and you’re committing an offence. Police ANPR cameras spot expired MOTs automatically now, so the old “I’ll just do it next week” calculation has changed.

Car tax (vehicle excise duty) can be set to auto-renew via direct debit, and for most people it is. But if you changed your card or cancelled the direct debit after selling a car, a replacement car might not be covered. The DVLA sends a reminder, but only to the address they have on file. If you’ve moved and not updated your log book, there’s no reminder at all.

Passports need renewing every ten years. Ten years is a long time. Long enough to forget. The Home Office recommends renewing at least three months before expiry, and many countries won’t let you in with less than six months on the passport. Every summer there are queues at the passport office made of people who didn’t do the maths until it was too late.

Driving licence photo cards expire every ten years too. This one is forgotten by almost everyone. The card has an expiry date on the front that nobody ever looks at. Driving with an expired photo card is a 1,000 pound fine.

The ones you can live without, but shouldn’t

Boiler services. Most manufacturer warranties require an annual service to stay valid. Skip one and your five-year warranty is now a two-year warranty you paid full price for. Boilers that get serviced break down less. It’s worth the eighty quid.

Smoke alarms are meant to be tested monthly and replaced every ten years. Nobody does this. The alarm only tells you it’s failing when the battery dies at three in the morning.

Pet insurance, if you have it, renews annually with new exclusions often added for anything your pet has been treated for that year. If you don’t read the renewal letter, you can end up paying for insurance that no longer covers the thing you need it for.

TV licences renew annually. If you cancelled Netflix because you never watched it, you might want to check whether you ever watch live TV or iPlayer either. 169 pounds a year adds up.

The ones you set up and forgot about

Subscriptions are the slow drain. The gym you joined in January. The streaming service you used for one show. The mindfulness app from the week you were going to get serious about mindfulness. The storage subscription for photos you no longer take.

Most banks now have a “recurring payments” view in their app that shows you everything going out on subscription. It is always longer than you think.

Why this happens

None of these things are difficult individually. The difficulty is that there are about twenty of them, they come round on different dates, and the reminders come from twenty different email addresses, none of which live in the same place as each other or as anything else in your life.

If you’re the one in your household who handles this stuff, you know the feeling: a low background sense that you’ve probably forgotten something, that you’ll find out what it was only when it becomes a problem.

You probably haven’t, most of the time. But the watching for it is exhausting in a way that doesn’t quite register until you stop having to do it.

---

Oosby exists, in large part, because of this list. You add the thing once, and it remembers when it’s due, and it tells you in time to actually do something about it. There’s no magic to it. It’s just the job done, quietly, by something other than you.

And then, slowly, you stop carrying the list in your head.