I don’t want you to wait any longer to negotiate your cable bill. Personally, I waited too long to try to lower my cable bill and a financial adviser I should take my own advice. I’ll share my experience and success with the cable company.
I’m sharing my experiences for four main reasons:
1. To demonstrate that you can almost but not always save money and get more value if you’re willing to put in just a token amount of effort.
2. To show you how inconsistent customer service is and why one phone call can go incredibly poorly only to be followed by another that has you shaking your head asking, “Why can’t they all be like that?”
3. To illustrate that there are as many answers to your service and billing-related questions as there are potential people who can answer your phone call.
4. To prove to you that I go through the same process I advise you to go through, and ensure that I never become just some talking head who ignores my own personal issues, instead relying on experiences reported to me by others or from my memories of how it worked in the increasingly distant past.
Rubin versus cable company: When I first moved to New Hampshire, we signed up for the cable company’s “triple play” which, for $99, got us cable TV, phone, and high-speed Internet access. It was the best deal I could find for the services I desired and so all was good.
A year later, of course, the deal expired and I began to pay full-rate (total bill including taxes was about $162). On my perpetual to-do list was to call and haggle another deal.
Too much time went by before I made the call.
You: Why?
Me: I’m human. I didn’t really want to deal with this and I am legitimately busy.
You: Excuses.
Me: No argument whatsoever.
You: So what finally happened?
Me: My wife called the cable company.
You: How’d she do?
Me: Not bad, but not great.
You: How so?
Me: Well for starters, she actually called so she was ahead of my pathetic performance. But her results were mixed. She was able to get the rate down just by calling. The representative actually told her, “Based on your account history, you’re certainly due for another package discount.” She offered my wife about a $50 discount from where we were, a savings of about 30 percent.
