It doesn’t hurt to ask

Photo from PSD

Yesterday, I had to make a call to our internet provider – our latest payment wasn’t showing up on the bill. I knew this was going to be a waste of a lot of time.

After dealing with the problem, I made a casual enquiry as to when our contract expires. I had received a very good offer from the competition and was considering switching. Funnily enough, our contract expired three days ago. So I asked the question:

Can you do me a better deal?

40 minutes later and I saved us $360 over the next 9 months or $40 a month less than what we are paying now and with the same service, download limit etc. After 9 months our contract amount reverts back to what it is now, with a 10% discount every month.

And I spent the 40 minutes on the exercise bike – exercise for the day done – $360 in the pocket! Not a waste of time after all. Not a bad way to multi task your exercise time as well, although the lass on the other end of the line might have thought the heavy breathing was a bit creepy.

A 32% a year saving on one just one expense isn’t half bad. Now the next step is to ask the same question of all our other service providers or switch:

• Telephone
• Electricity
• Insurance
• Mobile
• credit card

Just a small saving with each will add up to hundreds of dollars over the year.

When we first bought our house, I nearly died when we got our first rates notice. I thought it was way too expensive. Everyone (family and friends) I spoke to said the same thing:

Welcome to reality. Deal with it.

Instead of “dealing with it”, I made a quick call to the local council and asked the same question:

Can you do me a better deal?

It turns out they had made a mistake on our rates notice. One 10 minute, 25c call saved us $270 a year. What did I have to lose by making a quick call? Nothing. What did I have to gain? $270 dollars. If I had just let it slide like everyone told me, we would have been paying an extra $270 every year.

It doesn’t hurt to ask.