What would you do with an extra $500 – $1500 of free money each year? Take a family vacation, put it in savings, add it to your college/retirement fund, pay down debt etc… In other words, there would be many uses for that money, right? OK, so now you are probably wondering, where do I go to find this “free” money?
Well let me start by telling you a story that I’m sure we can all relate too. Last January, my friend received a flyer in the mail from her cable company stating that because she was such a “loyal” customer, she was going to get 3 months of HBO for free! Well she thought, “How cool is that? I’m definitely going to take advantage of this and then I will call back and cancel it before my “free service” is up”. So for the next 3 months, she totally enjoyed “free HBO” and by the time came to cancel, she kept saying, “I’ll do it tomorrow”… even after she was sitting there watching the 110th viewing of “Grease” with John Travolta and Olivia Newton John! Then, life stayed busy and she just never got around to canceling, so over the last eight months she ended up adding $80 to her account… and they said it was free HBO!?
Almost every company that we have an account with, entices us with these low cost items throughout the year and we honestly think that we will try it “only once” and then we ultimately forget about cancelling, so much so that by the end of the year we are spending hundreds of dollars that we had no intention of spending in the first place! Plus, trying to remember everything that we signed up for gets so complicated that we just throw our hands up in the air and go on paying and paying…
Instead of giving up, there are two things you can do right now to stop putting money into their pockets and start putting it back into your own pocket:
- Call your service providers and simply ask them to review your account to determine if there is any way you can reduce your bill. Most representatives tend to be very helpful with finding ways to reduce the money that you are spending because they want to keep your business.
- Do a little research on how much you may be able to save by switching to another company. By knowing the competition’s rates you can either switch and save or you can let your company know that you want to stay with them but you may have to switch if they cannot offer you the same rates or find some incentive (less money) to keep your business.
By doing these two simple things with all of your accounts (phone, internet, auto insurance… etc.) you will be able to save some money. It took my friend about an hour to call both her cable and cellular company and when finished, she was able to get her bills reduced and will now be able to save a total of $250 over the next 12 months! By tightening up your budget, you will be able to put that extra money to better use… maybe even get out of debt that much quicker.
Make it a great day!
Marla J. Blanchard
MJB’s Bookkeeping Solutions
Don’t keep me a secret, if you know someone who could use a bit of Bookkeeping TLC let them know that they are not alone and have them call me 805-764-1MJB (1652).
