The 3rd Decade Podcast
The 3rd Decade Podcast
Negotiating Bills
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Join Scott Bennett & Nikita Wolff as they discuss negotiating bills, including: ways to prepare for it, personal stories, and strategies for doing so.
How's it going, everyone. Thank you for tuning into the third day decade podcast. My name is Scott Bennett and I'm Nick Wolf. And we're gonna team up today again and talk about how to negotiate, to save. So we've talked about budgeting quite a lot , um, and it's something that participants seem to always wanna talk about, but this is one of the tools I think that you , if you kind of say, yeah, I'm I know budgeting's good. I'm still dealing with a finite source of income here, and I'm still dealing with bills that need to be paid. You know, how do I actually save? We, we've all heard the tropes of, you know, don't go to Starbucks. If , if you, if you don't go to Starbucks every day , you will become a millionaire. I think I've read about 50 articles about that, a online <laugh> . Um , this is, this is , uh , kind of a different type of real world application, which is, you know, what things I think do we, as consumers take for granted sometimes , uh, in terms of our consumer power , uh, we do talk about it in class , uh, during the third decade curriculum , uh , especially about in terms of shopping around for insurance, but we wanted to provide some other real examples and some ways to do it.
Speaker 2Yeah. So I know negotiating can be really hard for some people, depending on your personality type. I know for myself, it, I , I think there's always a piece of me that like dies inside a little bit, have to make that phone call. But at the same time, I kind of have to remind myself that I'm the customer I'm giving my money to them and they don't know me. It's not anything personal to them. So whenever I call, like I've called Geico probably two or three times since I've held them as my insurer and , uh, talked about discounts that might be available to me. And I just, they don't know me, so I don't have to feel embarrassment about it. Um, I know though it can be really hard for some people to, to call. Yeah.
Speaker 1It , it is definitely the same for me as well that I love that you said a little piece of you dies inside cuz I, I , I have to like work myself up and like jump around the house a little bit. Yeah.
Speaker 2But yeah . I like write notes down to myself . Yeah .
Speaker 1That's the thing I , that is what I found. I'm so glad you said that. Cuz that's what I found helps me the most. If I like feel super prepared to make this call and I know like, okay, here's, here's what they're gonna say to shut me down. Here's here's this and here's that . But when I can call somebody and, and do a little bit of a negotiation, if I know what their competitors are charging or at least have an idea, I feel so much more at ease. Uh , I , for sure I've thought about it when, when we were , uh , talking about this episode of being ready to walk away, I think that is something huge. You're not just calling to get a discount. You know, the best case scenario of these negotiations is you call up your current provider and they say, oh yeah, you're right. You do qualify for this, this and this. And then you get a discount. That's great. However , uh , another scenario is they could say no that very real possibility. No, we can't offer you anything at this point. Well, if you already did your research before you could be ready to walk away, then, then , okay, I'm gonna have to cancel with you all and then sign up with somebody else. That's a hassle. Um, and I think it's one reason why people don't do it nearly as much as they should is that the negotiation process in itself is , is anxiety inducing. And then it can , you can create some extra work for yourself. Um, it's not an easy thing to do so yeah. It's not like, Hey, I'm just gonna switch my cell phone provider today. Uh you're then having to get on, on the, the phone with a couple different people. So, you know, kind of play in these days out and stuff ahead and, and think about it because , um, negotiation is an ongoing process. You're not gonna do it one time. And then all of a sudden see all these savings, it's gonna have to be something that you check in on and, and really being that conscious consumer regularly. Yeah.
Speaker 2And one of, one of the, the trickiest negotiations I've probably found myself then was that I moved into our new house in, I think November of 2018. So I changed my internet provider changed what side of town I lived on. So they didn't even offer the same providers. So I have Cox now I moved into the new house and didn't really about the fact that I signed the, the promotional deal at the time, which is a year long. And apparently they don't send you any sort of , uh , warning that your bill is about to skyrocket. Yeah . So I was used to paying, oh gosh, I'm trying to remember what it was. I think it was like $43 or something like that. And the next month it was like 82. Yeah . And I was like, what happened? Like did they increase my speeds? Like what is going on? So once I logged into my account and looked at it, it was like, basically your promotional deal has run out. This is your new price. I was like, oh, well, that's lovely. So I had to start looking around my other internet provider that I could have used with CenturyLink. So I tried looking at what sort of pricing they had outside of their promotional deal. Right. When you sign up to try to kind of compare and it allowed me to kind of know what my bottom line was whenever I called to see what they could do price wise . Yeah . Um, and I'm was able to end up talking them down, probably another, I wanna say $18 , uh, to get my internet back to a price that I felt like was at least reasonable. And I think in the future , um, maybe if I was signing up with a new provider, I might see what kind of long term deal they could give me, rather than just like, it might look really appealing to have that deal for one year. But if I can get like a lifetime price and know what I'm gonna have for the long haul, there's a lot of value in
Speaker 1That too. For sure. And, and they kind of, you're, you're already a little bit less at a negotiation point. You've signed that deal. They're thinking the same way that we just brought up, like, okay , uh , she could cancel. Um, but then she's gonna have to get a new internet provider out there, maybe set up some new equipment, et cetera , et cetera , which is a hassle. So your point of like, let's do it, do it early, ask around. I think everybody gets trapped into those deals, especially when you're combining cable and internet. Uh , what I found for ours was , um, we, when we moved into our house, we decided to get cable for the first time in a long time, mostly. So I could watch like all the sports that I wanted to watch. And, and now there are better streaming services and stuff, but I know after our year after our kinda year promotion went over too , my, my bill sky Rocky did. And then when I called them, I said, listen, here's, what's important to me. If it's, it's the sports parts , that's really why we have cable. And if you all can't provide that at a much cheaper rate. Sure. My, the 350 channels are, are okay. Um, but we don't, we don't watch them . Right. But I watch four . Yeah . And, and it , and so they were able to say, okay, here's, you're gonna lose a bunch of channels. Are you sure? You're okay with that? Yeah. I lost a ton of channels, but then I gained , uh, some sports channels , uh , that I could, I could watch all the time. So yeah, it's , it's kind of knowing what's important to you and, and the cable internet thing. That's kinda your classic trope. You're , you're lucky in the sense that you had two providers. Some people don't even have two providers where they live . Right. Especially cable wise . Um, but they're one of those that it's like, oh man, you're , you might be on the phone for half a day trying to figure this out , um, set aside some time and do it, but your example of $18 a month, that's huge that that's a big chunk . Right . That adds up over time . It definitely does. So , um, that's not, you know, yeah. That, that is not a, a small number, especially if, if it's one of those unconscious spending things that we all do. Uh, now, you know, you're a little bit more conscious about it when we, when we were kind of going down our list of some other things I thought to , uh, back to the time when I first started at the third decade. Um, and, and I kind of took over a little bit of the, of the bookkeeping role kind of as , as good as I could, which was not very good. Um, and, and there was one point where I completely spaced on paying the credit card bill for our like business credit card. It wasn't very high or anything like that. And I, I was talking to, to this lady who was helping me out some with the bookkeeping and stuff, and I said, yeah, she asked , well, where's this , what's this bank charge about? And I told her, and she said, well, call the bank and , and tell him like that you don't wanna pay this. And I said, really, you can do that. And she said, of course you can.
Speaker 2The worst thing they can say is too bad. Yeah. The best thing they can say
Speaker 1Is sure. Yeah. And she said, point to point to how loyal of a customer you've been, or this business has been and point to how this is the first time you've ever missed a payment, things like that. I know . Yeah. It was a $25 charge or something like that. Not gonna make or break the organization. But again, it's kind of it's, it's it, would've been easier just to say, yeah, I screwed up. I'm gonna pay this charge and, and eat it. Yeah . But at the end of the day, I made a little bit of an extra effort, made the call, told him , Hey, I screwed up. Is there anything we can do here in , I was surprised at how easy it was and that the same goes for credit cards too. You know, they, it's a competitive market out there. Use that to your advantage, know how many credit cards are out there, know the points that they're offering and know what, you know, if you're paying a , a fee to use your card every month, see if there's another card that doesn't for a fee and use that. I mean, that nothing says that just because that credit card charges, the fee to use, it doesn't mean that they charge that fee to everybody.
Speaker 2Yeah. And you know, you just don't know unless you ask. Yeah. Um , for some of these things, like we had , uh , something, it didn't feel very funny at the time, but we had just switched over to Verizon and , uh, we were sharing a very small gigabyte data plan. Uh , my husband and I, and one night , uh, I wanna say he turned on some rain sounds on YouTube to fall asleep too . And we were at home. So we were on wifi , of course, but we hadn't yet like set our cell data preferences of like, which apps can use data and which ones can't, mm-hmm <affirmative>. So apparently our internet went out in the middle of the night and we woke up to being like pretty substantially over our, our data limit just from like a single night of rain sounds right . <laugh> and we felt so stupid about it, but I mustered up the courage to call Verizon and explain to them what had happened. And they were really forgiving about it. They ended up waving it and giving us a little extra data to be able to make it to the end of the month and costing us no extra. So you really don't know unless you ask, oh, wow.
Speaker 1Yeah. That's, that's awesome. And not fun to get on the phone with Verizon. Um , the cell phones are, are kind of light cable in that, in that we all know, right. We all know that you're probably gonna be in it for the long haul, but it's another thing that is a monthly bill that most people pay every single month. And if you can shave a little bit off, that's huge that this, this is another light cable or even more so than cable, that there are so many competitors out there , um, shopping around really helps and knowing what you can get elsewhere when you call , um, is, and being prepared to share that info, right? Hey, this is what I'm paying for for my phone bill. You know, why is that? Why , why can't I get the same exact plan with X provider , um, and pay pay much less. They might have a reason, right? They might say, yeah, you, you can try it. Your service is gonna be terrible. That might be the , the dice you have to roll, but yeah . Being , being prepared with what that is, I think also, I , I believe it's sprint, maybe who's running a promotion right now talking about how current customers and , uh, new customers get the same deal . Well, I think that's kind of the case with a lot of cell phone providers. Sure. There are sign up bonuses that when you sign up, you get a new phone and stuff. I'm not saying you could call your provider and demand a new phone, but if they're running these deals based on data, your charges monthly, that you're seeing call 'em and say, Hey, I'm already a, a customer with you all. And I'm , I've seen this deal. How, how can I get, how can I get that? Um, because here I've been with you all for two years and now , um, but, but my Bill's a lot higher than you're offering now. And again, it just doesn't hurt to ask.
Speaker 2Yeah. You know, one of the ways that I tried to reduce my costs , uh , pro straight out of college towards the end of college starting , um, I joined Google fi as my cell phone provider for a bit. And I liked him . Um, I ended up not staying with them longer than I think it was two or three years. Um , maybe even actually a little less than two years now that I say that. Cause I think I had to pay off the last little bit of my phone, but , um, we used them because it was so cheap. It was like $10 a gig for data. However, where we lived, it was like I was dropping one out of every four calls that I had. It was driving me crazy. So I was like, okay, what can I possibly do? I've I , at that point in my life, I had never had Verizon. I was always jealous of my friends that did cause I , I always had like no cell provide or no cell service issues at all. Yeah . Um, so what I did was I tried to get creative. You know, if I want Verizon, if the , the quality of the service is important to me, what am I willing to do to be able to get them? And what I ended up doing was search back through the last year of my data usage and seeing where it actually fell and being that I was either at school, on wifi , at home, on wifi or at work on wifi . Most of my data was averaging around a gig a month. So that's whenever Colin and I were able to look at Verizon plans and decide, you know what, sharing two gigs, it's gonna feel tight on some months, but we think it's doable. And so far with exception to that YouTube night, <laugh> we have never gone over the limit. We have come within 0.01 gigs to the limit, but we've never gone over . Wow .
Speaker 1Wow. That's yeah. And it's, and it , and again, you said it and, and even if you, you know, you , you , you get what you pay for in a lot of things. Um, and we're not saying that, you know, you , you have to be paying the lowest rate of anything. Yeah. If you're dropping every other call, like you brought up not worth it, probably. And, and yeah, that makes sense to pay a little more , a little bit of a side note is my sister straight outta college actually worked for at and T and , um, did, did some corporate sales stuff for them and everything. I had no idea the level of competitiveness and how much Verizon and at and T do not like each other. And then it , and then I started noticing it in commercials and stuff. Right. There was a time where like, it seemed like every other commercial, they were one was attacking the other. <laugh> like smearing the other , yeah , yeah. A little smear campaign. Again , it felt like political , but my sister actually told me, she's like, Hey, use that against them . And see what at T is offering when call Verizon and see what Verizon is offering when you call at and T because they're , they don't, they don't wanna lose , uh, clients to anybody. They definitely don't wanna lose them to each other. Right.
Speaker 2It's the last , last place they want to steal their business. Yeah.
Speaker 1Yeah. So that's great. Yeah. I think cell phones and cable it's , those are, those are com some of the common ones that we see, and we hear, hear our participants talk about that, where they were able to save some by, by calling and kind of putting up with, with the hours on hold and stuff like that. But one that, you know, I personally experienced that I was surprised about, but then I've, I've heard more and more stories about is in actual I debt collection. So you've already spent the money and now somebody is, is looking to collect on that. And I'm not talking about it. Doesn't have to necessarily be, oh, you're late on your payments. I am a debt collector. It's just, Hey, who, who do you owe money to? Can you work out a deal with them to do it? So sometimes times it is that I'm the debt collector where you can make an offer to pay , um, to pay a little bit less, but maybe sooner and things like that.
Speaker 2Yeah. I've had friends that , um, I'm gonna use fake numbers, cause I don't remember their numbers, but let's, let's say they owed $10,000 and a debt collector was calling them those debt collectors personally, they are not owed $10,000. So you can say you can kind of play hardball with them, especially if enough time has passed and they'll be happy to get, you know, 7,000, 6,000. Like if you just say like, listen, this is what I have take it or leave it. You can, I've actually heard of stories where like large chunks of debt is settled because they just wanna get paid something and they'll
Speaker 1Let it go. Yep . Yep . And, and, and the hassle of, of tracking down , I've heard that too. And, and if you're in the situation where you are in a debt collection situation, it it's a way to, to try again. You're already there, what's the harm in asking and if you could save some money on top of it , uh , my example is a little bit different in that. Um, when my first daughter was born, we had quite the big hospital bill come in the mail to us. Right. And I, I, we had saved up for it. We had the money for it, which was awesome. However, I still went, man, this is, this will just hurt me to pay it. Like hurts my soul. And I, I talked to somebody and they said, no, call the hospital. And they're gonna offer you a payment plan, figure out what that payment plan is. <affirmative> . And so what this, this one was, was, they said, okay, you can pay this over two years with 0% interest. I went, oh, good. That way I can spread it out. It won't, you know, feel like such a big hit mm-hmm <affirmative> . And so I said, okay, sign me up. And then I talked to that same person. They said, no, no, no. I , I meant to tell you this as well. When you get that number, when you get that monthly payment number, then say, okay, how much are you able to take off if I pay it all up front mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so I cut them back and I said, okay, I'm on this payment plan. It's gonna take you hospital two years to get this full amount of money. How much are you willing take off if I take it all, if I pay it all up front . Yeah. And, and they, they took off 20%. Um ,
Speaker 2That's amazing. I, I did the same thing with my orthodontist. Yeah. Uh , whenever I had my treatment a few years ago, they took off 10% for me paying in
Speaker 1Advance. Yeah. And it, and it , and it makes sense. Both parties went in, you know, they're, they're trying to get , um, get the most amount of money in the quickest amount of time. And so, yeah , so that, that 20% for me saved us quite a lot of money. And, and we were able to do it. We were fortunate enough to, to have saved for it and were able to do it now with my second daughter, I tried the same exact thing that I did with the first. And I said , uh, yep . What's your two year payment. Like they , they gave me the number 0% interest. And I asked the same question and I was told, no, they said, no, you we're not doing that. Was it a different hospital? It was a different hospital. That that's one reason . But , but the guy even told me on the phone, you know, we used to do that to some, and we, we still do it sometimes, but right now is not a time when we're doing it. So I , I literally think it depends on what their books and stuff look like that month or that year or something. But ,
Speaker 2But I , but again, it never hurts to ask, I guess .
Speaker 1Yeah. And we went back and forth for a little bit. And, and, and I'm, again, as I said at the top, I am not the most, I'm not the best person when it comes to negotiating, but I think I did a pretty good job in this case. He was not budgeting . And so in that case, I said, oh, okay, we're gonna stick with the two year plan percent interest. We're gonna spread out that payment. Some , because I'm not paying you all, any interest at all and try and save in other ways , uh, in the same time. So we're not just taking that big hit . So, no, I didn't get the discount. But at the end of the day, I got two years to, to pay off this, this chunk of a bill. Um, and at 0% interest, which , which like a , a mini win for me, I
Speaker 2Guess yeah. As much of a win as you can, having to pay, you know, thousands of dollars in medical. Yeah . So
Speaker 1Exactly. That's great. Yeah. So the last thing we kinda had on our list to talk about was, and it , this is the thing that we talk about the most within our classes , um, is insurance car are in home, especially insurance and how to negotiate some
Speaker 2There. Yeah. So something that we talk about specifically in class is that , um , being loyal to a company doesn't actually end up saving you money. Typically they see that as that you're not very price sensitive. So sometimes you'll see a small increase in your rate over time, rather than a, which you'd think you'd be rewarded for staying with the company, but that's not how insurance works. Sadly. So even shopping around Scott, correct me if I'm wrong, the insurance companies can actually see that you're doing that. Right.
Speaker 1You know, I don't know. That's a good question. Um, I, I , I've always just told mine that I'm shopping around. I , yeah, you can do that as well. Again, just being, being prepared when I call mine, I said, Hey, I just got a quote from a different one. And they quoted me X for the same exact coverage. And I would rather stick with you all. But , uh, here , here I have this, and this is where the captive agents come into play, that you wanna work with somebody who can get quotes and reach out to a bunch of different insurance companies. They're not do the shopping around for you. Yeah . Do it for you. And that's what I did. I got like eight quotes without talking to anybody, but one person, because they shopped around for me. And then I went back to my, my agent and I said, Hey, or my current provider. And I said, Hey, here's, here's what it is. We also talk about holding a higher deductible, figuring out what that deduct is your , are your premium payments really low or really high because your deductible's really
Speaker 2Low. Yeah. And you have to know your, you have to know your financial situation. Um , I know for our house, because I already had an emergency fund established, I chose a higher deductible because I knew I could rely on that emergency fund if I absolutely needed to. Um, now I didn't make it like the whole size of my emergency fund by any means. But , uh , it ended up saving us over a couple hundred dollars a year just because of the deductible difference. And , um, the same with my car insurance for a short time, I had a $250 deductible rather than a $500 deductible. And that $250 deductible hiked my rates , um, enough to matter, I'd say. Right . It , it wasn't worth it.
Speaker 1Yeah. Yeah. So true. And , and it does depend on your situation and kind of, you know, your, even, even the value of your car, your home, but it's worth looking at, and again, being that conscious consumer.
Speaker 2Yeah. And also looking at your coverage, like very, very closely , um, because there are certain limits that maybe you would feel better holding like really high limits in some categories and you'd be okay with more moderate limits in other categories. Um, if you're still in the third decade program, you could definitely talk to your financial mentor about it, cuz we obviously don't wanna advocate that you underinsured yourself, but , um, there are definitely ways to, to kind of pick and choose where you're spending your money. And I know with Geico actually, it's kind of nice whenever I ever make adjustments to my coverage, it tells me exactly how many dollars it saves me on my six month premium. Mm . So I can actually kind of see where it matters the most. Um, and that's helped me make decisions on whether or not to carry comprehensive or not. Um, so depend on what age of, you know, the car you drive, you might be able to make in better informed decisions that way too. Yeah,
Speaker 1For sure. Well, Nick , I think we, we dove into a lot of helpful things here, hopefully for our listeners. And , um, I know, again, I , I know it's not an easy thing. We don't, we do expect somebody to listen to this and , uh , snap their fingers and all of a sudden they're calling everybody and , uh, demanding lower rates. But , uh, I , it is a pretty worthwhile exercise. Yeah.
Speaker 2And when you feel like you've gotten to the bottom of, of your , uh, ability to Whit down your budget, these are the categories that tend to be the hardest to, you know , be able to budge cuz you just see them as fixed, but to be able to save, you know, five to $30 per bill, it adds up. Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1Well, thanks for listening to everybody. We will talk to you again in a .