The opposite happened to my partner here in Portugal. She signed up to a gym ($100/month), and they literally forgot to start charging the account until 5 month

The opposite happened to my partner here in Portugal. She signed up to a gym ($100/month), and they literally forgot to start charging the account until 5 months later. Everything tends to be so inefficient here. I guess at least in this case the inefficiency worked in our favor. Now let's hope they won't take 5 months to stop charging when we cancel ;-)