You may have read some of my past blogs about money and finances, and I had an experience a few weeks ago that I thought was worth sharing in the spirit of getting the most out of your money within the system we’re in.
I have Xfinity for my internet services and when I first signed up, it was for a year-long contract for a promotional price. Great. I signed up, set up auto-pay, and off we went.
A year later, I noticed the cost went up for no articulated reason. What? Why???
After three months of this increased price (yes, sometimes I am lazy in dealing with things I really don’t want to deal with), I finally called and made it through the automated customer service system to speak to a human. I asked about the price increase and they didn’t spend long on it before offering me their current promotion, which dropped the price to a few dollars less than the original price if I signed up for a year. OK cool.
Fast forward to about a month ago when I got my standard monthly email alerting me to the automated payment and the price had gone up $20.
WHAT THE SERIOUS FUCK.
I am going to exercise ENORMOUS self-restraint to stay off my soapbox about how cable companies (and others) take advantage of customers’ set-it-and-forget-it mentality (which they promote through the ease of autopay), and suddenly they are paying scads of unnecessary dollars. Big deep breath.
And instead, I will tell you what I did. Which was to call (YET AGAIN) the painful automated system to get to a human, where they outlined the current promotions and there was one that CUT MY BILL IN HALF FOR A BETTER PACKAGE THAN I PREVIOUSLY HAD.
The moral of this post is not to examine our intentionally problematic systems (because that would take a blog post 3.5 times the length) but instead to demonstrate that expenditures that you may think of as “fixed” may in fact be quite negotiable and are worth that phone call. Cutting my bill in half means I’m saving $40 every month, which (fast math) means almost $500 per year. Now go get your money back!!
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Supergirl is here to save you from overpaying on your bills!!!