Solutions Economic and Market Watch

Hello, and welcome to the Economic and Market Watch podcast for the week of August 24, 2026. This is Sam Kem of CFC.

Before we start, let me ask you this. How many subscriptions do you have? And next, are you sure that's all you have?

On August 10, 2026, we published a Financial Feature article about what I call the "economy of subscription," and you can find the link to it in the show notes.

The article explores a simple trend. More and more of everyday life comes with recurring charges, from software to television, music, cloud storage, and AI services. And increasingly, even things that we own come with payments that never truly disappear.

Take housing. A homeowner may eventually make the last mortgage payment, but property taxes, insurance, and maintenance continue. And for homes and HOAs or condominium associations, there's another recurring payment, the association dues. A recent Wall Street Journal article highlight that those obligations can become serious enough that unpaid HOA dues can ultimately threaten someone's ownership of the home as evidenced by the recent increase in foreclosures caused by HOA fee delinquencies.

But housing is only one example of a much bigger transformation.

Think about how we used to consume.

You bought Microsoft Office and used that copy for years. You bought CDs and built a music collection. You purchased a car and might buy some extra features upfront.

However, increasingly, we're not purchasing product just once. We are purchasing continued access.

And I want to discuss that distinction today because subscriptions fundamentally change the economics for households. A purchase has a known price. A subscription has a current price. There's no guarantee that today's $10 monthly subscription will cost $10 five years from now, much less twenty years from now.

And that brings us to a consequence of the subscription economy that we don't talk about enough: It makes our future cost of living less predictable.

Imagine you're 45 years old and planning to retire at 65. Financial planning requires making assumption about your future expenses. How much will you spend on housing, transportation, communications, entertainment, and technology?

Those estimates have always involved uncertainty. Inflation is nothing new, but subscriptions introduce another layer of uncertainty.

Your mortgage will be paid off. But what will your HOA dues be? Perhaps you own your car, but will some of the technology you rely on inside that car require monthly subscriptions?

And consider the technology itself. Twenty years from now, what services will be so deeply integrated into daily life that opting out isn't realistically convenient? Artificial intelligence may be one. Cloud services may be another. There will almost certainly be others that we have not even invented yet.

And unlike a product you purchased years ago, the provider of a subscription can change its price.

So retirement planning increasingly requires estimating not merely what things will cost, but what the coding services we will need to keep paying for just to participate in ordinary life.

There's an obvious counterargument, of course. Nobody forces you to subscribe. Cancel Netflix. Don't pay for Spotify. Skip the premium AI service. Buy a basic car. Live somewhere else without an HOA.

And for many services, that's perfectly reasonable. But the line between luxury and necessity has a funny way of moving.

Think about smartphones. People sometimes say we survived perfectly well without smartphones. And, of course, we did. But try living without one today.

Your smartphone may be how you authenticate your bank account. It's your GPS, your boarding pass, your rideshare connection, your parking mirror, your camera, your calendar, your email, your payment method, your two factor authentication device.

Restaurants increasingly use QR code menus. Airlines send gate changes through apps. Schools communicate with parents through mobile platforms. Doctors' offices send appointment and information and test result electronically. Concert and sporting event tickets increasingly live on phones.

You can live without a smartphone, but the surrounding economy has increasingly been designed on the assumption that you have one.

At some point, the distinction between optional and necessary becomes less obvious, And that's what makes the subscription economy important for financial planning. It's not simply that subscription cost money, but it's that they turn portions of our future cost of living into perpetual variable obligations.

A mortgage is fixed and has an ending date. A product has a purchase price, but a subscription can continue indefinitely, and its price can change along the way.

Individually, these payments may seem trivial. $10 here, $20 there, $50 somewhere else. But collectively, they create something different, a permanent layer of expenses underneath everyday life.

For someone working, rising subscription cost may be irritating. But for someone living on retirement income, they may be much more consequential.

A retiree might own the home, own the car, and have accumulated substantial assets, yet still discover that maintaining an ordinary, modern lifestyle requires an expanding collection of monthly payments whose future costs were difficult to predict decades earlier.

That does not mean subscriptions are inherently bad. They can lower upfront costs, provide continuous upgrades, and give customers access to services that once would have been prohibitively expensive. But we should recognize the trade-off.

The economy of ownership gave consumers something financially valuable beyond the asset itself: The sense of financial security once it is paid off. In the economy of subscription, financial security becomes a moving goalpost.

As we think about retirement in the decades ahead, it is simply not how much will we need to accumulate, but also how much of our future income will already be spoken for just to remain subscribed to everyday life.

And that's it for today. But before I let you go, this podcast is available on many podcast apps including Apple Podcast and Spotify. And unlike any other subscriptions, this one is free. If you don't subscribe already, please subscribe, rate us, and leave a review.

Thank you for listening. Be sure to download the Economic and Market Watch intelligence brief and dashboard. Talk to you soon.