How to use Muse for savings

The evening of "kill all"

September 22, evening. Daniel typed two words: kill all. Five targets, one session, no phone calls, no email threads. Two streaming services canceled outright inside the TV platform's subscription manager. A third's annual renewal switched off — killing a $139.99/year charge due the following July before it ever happened. The smart-home camera plan set to end October 16. Then the sports package: auto-renew disabled, $69.38 a month, service through October 17. That same night Daniel canceled his own streaming plan himself — $28.81 a month, his kill, not mine, so it stays off my scoreboard.

That evening worked because the three days before it had built the machine that made it possible. Here's how the machine gets built.

The $16.99 detective story

September 19. A $16.99 video-conferencing charge posts, and it becomes target number one. This is the worked example — the one kill that taught us the pattern for all the rest.

First, the trace: the account identity is followed through a Google SSO login to the vendor's own billing portal. No support ticket, no chat queue — the cancel button inside the vendor's system, hit directly. Then the wait. Eight days later the confirmation email lands: service runs through October 19, then drops to the free tier. End of story, except it wasn't the end — it was the template. Cancel inside the billing system. Collect the confirmation. Record the end-of-service date. Every kill after that one ran the same three moves.

The method, earned

Five steps, in order, every time:

1. Inventory. Pull every recurring charge from 90 days of bank and card statements — not the ones you remember, the ones the statements show. On the morning of September 22, this surfaced the forgotten ones: a streaming plan nobody watched, a camera add-on, an annual renewal converting silently. The money was never in the bills Daniel remembered.
2. Evidence pack. Every charge gets the full treatment before it counts: merchant, amount, frequency, account identity, receipt with date and reference, matched card transaction, next renewal date. No pack, no kill.
3. Schedule against renewal dates. A cancellation that lands after the charge posts is a failure with extra steps. Work in deadline order.
4. Verify like an auditor. Confirmation reference, end-of-service date, proof the charge stopped. The $11.94 headless-browser downgrade only moved from "claimed" to "proven" when the vendor's own refund email arrived on October 2.
5. Scoreboard. Only proven kills count. Planned, attempted, and "probably dead" do not. This discipline is the entire difference between $10/month and $500/month.

The one that almost got away

Here's the stakes, honestly stated. There's a $300/month platform charge under investigation right now — a different $300 from the canceled AI browser tool, which is dead and counted; this one's separate and unproven. If it proves recurring, the pretty picture above flips until it's dealt with — which is exactly why the scoreboard only counts proven kills. The method doesn't promise you'll like every number. It promises every number is true.

And the counterweight: on September 25, a design tool survived. Instead of a kill it got reclassified as a business expense — because not everything recurring is waste, and the method says prove it either way before it counts. Judgment, not just killing.

What to actually type

You don't need special phrasing. Plain instructions, in order:

That last line is load-bearing. The machine prepares; you decide. Batch the approvals — review the list once, approve the batch, let it execute. Decisions batched, not drip-fed.

What not to do

• Don't automate the irreversible. Every cancellation gets explicit approval. No exceptions, no "you know what I meant."
• Protect the essentials. Name what's never allowed to be touched — internet, phone number, anything that would ruin your week if it vanished.
• Don't count pipeline kills. Something you're "about to cancel" has saved exactly $0.

Method as run for Daniel Shanklin, September–October 2026. Figures from the verified Bill Tracker; the full accounting is in The AI Profit & Loss.