how to negotiate with your cable provider

So, I just received my bill for this month's cable and internet, provided by a major national cable company. For those of you who do not know our family, my husband serves in the United States Army, and thus we are a proud Army family. So we moved to our current post about a year ago.

Moral of the story, we've been here for a year, thus we've had all our utilities for about a year. Well for those of you who have gotten a great deal on cable may have had the same experience that I had today. I open my cable bill, and it's about $45 dollars more than what we usually pay! I am perplexed, call our cable provider, only to find out that our "great deal" was only a 12 month deal. Ugg, now I sware that they never told us that it was a 12 month-only deal, and I told the nice lady on the other end of the phone as such. I also told her that if I HAD known that, I would have looked at other providers. Thinking back on it now, there's a small chance they did mention it, or put it in tiny writing somewhere, but I have the memory of a goldfish {and for those of you who don't know, that's a whopping 3 seconds}. Anyhoo, I ask the lady, "well, is there any way I can get back our 'great deal' or do you have any other discounts available?!" I might have been a bit brusk, but she went ahead and there was indeed two discounts available to us. Whoohoo! Now it only saves us $15 a month over what we would have been expected to pay, but it also means our cable/internet bill only went up $30 as opposed to $45. So it's certainly better than it could have been.

My thought process through this whole thing was, "now just a month ago I was paying X dollars, and the cable company was doing just fine. Thus there is no reason I should be now paying X + 45 dollars, because obviously they can still provide the service without the extra $45." Am I wrong? Ridiculous. Oh yes, and I may have told the lady on the other end of the phone at some point that this was indeed ridiculous... maybe I shouldn't have mentioned that, but, well, I was heated at the time.

So what can you learn from my experience? What can you do if your rates for a particular utility go up unexpectedly? Well, let me share!

• wait a while to cool down before you make any phone calls, you get more flies with sugar than vinegar
• do your homework, look at other potential providers you could switch to that have better rates
• do your homework, check if your OWN provider has a discount or promotion currently going on
• ask if there are any new discounts available that you can take advantage of
• mention that there are indeed other providers you could switch to, but that it would certainly be easier to keep your business with them

Now these are just a few things that can help you if your rates suddenly jump, and all because a promotional period has expired on your current contract. Hey, it's worth a shot, right? And hey, we're now saving $180 a year just by making a 15 minute phone call. It may not seem like all that much, but that's money we can instead put toward tithing, missions trips, or other disasters, such as Haiti.

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