So, it’s important to read the entire contract before signing.” “If you sign your name to a contract, you are likely going to be bound by all terms contained in the contract. “Far and away, the most important thing to remember as a gym-goer is that courts strongly prefer the concept of ‘freedom of contract,’” Katz, the lawyer, told me. If you want to push the matter further to break your contract without a fee, you'll probably not find much help. Most gyms force people to send a certified/notarized letter or to appear in person, often while paying a cancelation fee. Many make it notoriously difficult to end memberships, overcomplicating the supposedly simple service and making the contracts air-tight to ensure they live up to the phrase 'health is wealth'. “Attorneys typically have seen every loophole or angle that a customer can use to wiggle out of a contract, so the drafting attorney has tried to seal up every potential loophole.” “Simply put, the contracts are so complicated because they are drafted by attorneys,” says attorney Steven M. "It’s important to read the entire contract before signing."Īnd the gyms have one thing that you (probably) don't: legal know-how. At a certain point, that needed to change. Fueled by changing jobs, moving apartments, and general laziness, I allowed myself to stay indebted to Crunch, Planet Fitness, and Blink locations in far-apart neighborhoods. What made me really wasteful was that I kept thinking that a change of scenery would be the spark that lit my fitness fire. Put the two together, and I had a comfortable little cycle going, always optimistic that I'd take the plunge and really commit-but that type of thinking, at least for me, wound up getting me into trouble. For five consecutive years, I was also among the people who used their gym memberships less than once a month. For the past decade, I've been one of the nearly half of Americans making fitness-related resolutions. My problem began in a fairly typical way: I resolutioned myself. At least, none of the three gyms that I once held memberships for (at the same time!) during one ridiculous period. During this time of isolation, I've taken a moment to reflect upon these places and think, 'Do I really miss this place?' For me, the gym was one luxury that I ended up not needing after all. Bars, theaters, barbershops, and-most painfully for our physical well-being-gyms. As it was going on for a significant number of months, it made me speculate whether I needed to lose my credit card just to disconnect it to this health club, because it seemed that it was no other way to get rid of the monthly charges.As we continue our quarantine, let us remember the luxuries of the past that we can no longer indulge. Each month, when I contacted the billing department, I kept learning anther rule that I had never heard before, which supposedly "prevented" the health club from canceling my membership. Even after living in Europe for months, I was still getting monthly charges on my credit card for a long-canceled service. Again, a different time, another supervisor from the club told me that I needed to send a certified mail for my intent of cancelation. After paying another month in the next billing period, I learned it from another representative that the cancelation time is three months. In fact, I had to learn it in a hard way that I needed to cancel my account also in writing. The lady whose task was to represent the department failed to inform me that it was not a valid cancelation. Before that, I called the customer department for more than two months before my intended move. Recently I relocated my residence from the US to Europe. I was a member of this health club in DC for over 15 years.
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