Yesterday I wrote an article about “Saving on Internet Service“. Many of the points ended with a similar message which is a segue into this article. People seem to be willing to over pay for various services such as internet, phone, and cable, just to name a few. They are unwilling to pick up that phone and make the call that will save them at least $10 a month for a year on a service they subscribe to. This is money saved with no change in the service that they receive. Now people don’t want to make that call for various reasons:
1: Time (aka lazy) - People think the savings isn’t worth their time to make that 5 minute phone call. My brother is a classic example “Pfft. I don’t care and it’s not worth my time”. I usually follow up that statement by asking him for $10 since money doesn’t seem to matter to him.
2: Fear - People lack confidence so they have a fear of rejection or that the service person on the phone will think they’re cheap so they put off making the call.
3: Lack of Knowledge - Companies are out to make money and if there is room to make money then there is room to bring down the price. People don’t seem to know this and just accept the listed price.
How can I start saving money?
The process consists of 4 easy steps and will probably take less then an hour to run all of your service providers through it:
Step 1 - Call your service provider and ask to speak to someone in billing or retentions.
Step 2 - Say the following “Hello, I’ve been looking over my bill and I don’t know if I can continue paying this much. Are there any promotions or discounts you can apply to help bring down the price?”.
Step 3 - The person can usually give you several options to help save. Choose one and save,
Step 4 - Rinse and Repeat yearly. Many of the savings you receive are promotional offers that will expire so once a year repeat the process.
So what is the value of a phone call?
If you are using a major provider and currently have no promotions applied to your account, you can save at least $10/month on each of services I listed (internet, phone, cable). So the value of a phone call is $120/year or $360 in total. But this is only the beginning. You may be able to save even more if you try and apply this process to your other services. Give it a try and let me know.
What type of services have you been able to save on and how much?
-mfd-
