Personal finance
I’ve been doing some reading on personal finance for the last six months or so. These are the ones I read almost everyday.
The biggest new pieces of advice I’ve learned from these are:
- Ask for a lower rate for practically anything.
- Pay yourself first; no one will fund your retirement but yourself.
After months of reading about it, I just called my credit card company and asked quite nicely for a lower rate, and they nigh-instantly decreased it by 5%. I don’t carry a balance so it’s just a theorectical gain, but still, it was nice. And really, really easy.
Do it!
Before submitting this entry, I called our joint credit card and they did not reduce this rate. But they said to call back in a month. Ok then! In a month, we’ll be in our second year with this card, so maybe something will open up.
Update: I just got our Comcast cable bill reduced from ~$81 to $62! I just said I’d like to either reduce my package or keep the package I have but get a discount. Even though I offered them a choice, they wanted to keep me on the same level of service, but for cheaper. Weird. I was very friendly and mentioned that I had been doing some competitive analysis and that Dish & DirecTV had cheaper offers. This discount is good for 12 months. Nice. Now, who else can I call?
I also reduced the size of our trashcan for a savings of about $25/month. We never downgraded even though our trash is usually not full, because there are weeks when the trash gets *quite* full.
However, you can pre-pay for these extra bags that they will pick up at around $5/bag, so I got a pack of 5 for those weeks when we have too much.
😀
Did not succeed with the cell phone company, but for the first time ever, I had such a pleasant & helpful customer service representative that I left the manager a voicemail complimenting the person I spoke to. She gave me several options and even did a bunch of calculations for me to see if I should switch to pre-paid to see if I’d save money and continued to look up everything I asked about, while maintaining a friendly yet professional demeanor.
Holy crap, you’re on a roll. I did a lot of that (with the assitance of a financial management company) back when I first started working because I had a huge debt, but I haven’t gone back and tried in a while.
Didn’t realize you could negotiate new rates on stuff like cable, though. That’s pretty rad.
Apparently, cable/phone/internet and credit companies that you should call periodically to see if there are better rates, since the competition is always pretty heated and costs are always dropping. So even if you already got a lowered rate, you should call again in like 6 months or a year to see if it can happen again, as you’ve been a loyal customer for yet another year.
It’s easy to think that since you are already a customer, they don’t care about you, but since they know you are a reliably paying customer (I am constantly surprised by “non-compliance”, i.e., non-payment levels in the customer base of subscription-based companies when I get a chance to hear about them), they don’t want to lose you.
They can also see that you are too lazy to hop around from company to company, so that once you move somewhere else, you are unlikely to move back.
Bwahahhaa.
The other thing I learned is that “customer acquisition” costs are HUGE compared to the cost of keeping an existing customer, so they’d rather keep you than lure a new client in.
I also told the customer representatives to please inform their managers that I had a really great experience with them.