Would You Make a Ten-Minute Phone Call for $57?
Saturday, 29th March 2008 (by J.D.)This article is about Basics, Money Hacks, Real-Life
GRS reader Dan recently wrote to share a story I hear often. Many people are afraid to ask for a better deal — they think it’s not worth the effort. Dan has decided that it is:
I thought I’d share a short story about credit cards. I’ve been using them for eight years now, and have always paid my bill in full every month. I use Quicken to keep track of what I’ll owe at the end of the month. I reconcile my bill against quicken when I receive it in the mail and schedule payment online at the same time.
Well, this month I must have told Quicken I paid my bill without actually going online and scheduling it (or I didn’t click the ‘authorize’ button). I noticed my checking account was high from what Quicken said and looked into the matter.
My credit card company said I hadn’t paid and it was too late to pay and avoid a late fee. I asked them about it, but since my next bill hadn’t been sent out yet so they couldn’t tell if I’d be dinged. The customer service guy wrote a ‘note’ in my account about what we’d talked about and that was that.
A week later, my bill posted and I called back to see if I could get the $39 late fee and $18 finance charge reversed. I actually had to call twice because I didn’t see both charges on my bill, but both calls took about 10 min combined.
Here’s the important part: all I had to do was call and ask!
I told them I was a good customer, explained what happened, and simply asked for each charge to be reversed. It was that easy! They even told me the reason they were doing it: “good history”. If you do the math, that’s $342 an hour. Not bad and not stressful.
I’m one of those people who is naturally shy to use the telephone. I’m just not very assertive. But even I have learned that it’s worth my time and effort to call and complain about unjust charges, or to attempt to get certain fees reversed.
One final note: a recent Business Week article notes that although credit card companies may still be waiving fees for good customers, they’re not as willing to reduce interest rates as they once were. All the same, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask.
Very good idea. It goes to show that you will be amazed at what you can get in life if you simply ask.
my card of choice quit dropping my interest rate about a year ago. i still ask twice a year but i now get this scripted line from the person on the other end of the phone.
i always ask for deals if i’m buying anything above and beyond the week’s groceries. that was especially helpful when it came time to buy a basic career wardrobe. it never hurts to ask- the worst they can do is say no.
You’re right - the worst thing they can say is no. (And it sounds like most of the time they’ll say yes.)
I don’t know about lenders’ willingness to drop interest rates — until recently, I’d never been brave enough to ask. But it’s TOTALLY worth it. I have four cards, and I made a point to call them all six weeks or so ago to ask for interest rate decreases. One said I was already at the lowest available rate, two others immediately offered me better rates, and the fourth said they didn’t do rate changes over the phone but said I’d have to write a letter. I dithered a bit (a letter! What is this, the 20th century?) but finally did it, and following advice I’ve been reading, rather than leaving it open with a vague request like “please lower my rate,” I explained that my rate (which was like 26%) was much higher than all my other cards and the card was consequently useless to me, and asked that they immediately lower the rate by ten points or more. They got back to me in about two weeks cut it by 3/4, to about 7%, undercutting my next-best card by almost half. So it required jumping through hoops, but it was absolutely worth it.
The only sad thing is now that I don’t carry balances anymore it doesn’t really matter, unlike back when I had $15k revolving! I wish I’d known it was possible to request changes back then. Oh well, it still makes me happy.
This goes for more than just cc companies… Shortly after signing up for DirectTv, my husband and I moved. When we called to have the service moved, we were told that because we were such new customers they would have to charge us $50. I complained (nicely), since there was no mention of a fee anywhere on the website or on any of the paperwork I had. They insisted the system would not allow them to progress unless I paid the $50 right then and there. I managed to get to a supervisor who offered to reduce my monthly bill by $10 for six months (for a savings of $60). I still had to pay the $50 to move, but in the end I actually saved $10… it ALWAYS pays to ask!
The trick is to let them know that you’re unhappy, but to be reasonable and polite about it (screaming gets you nowhere)
Great story, Dan. To piggy-back off of what Heidi said, I recently called my cable company (Charter Communications) for a random account question. At the end of our call they tried to sell me on their faster cable-internet service for an extra $5 or $10 a month. I responded with “how about you keep me at my current service but lower my rate to $25.00 a month since I get cable from you as well?” The customer service rep said “just a moment” and when he came back he offered me a rate about $15.00 less a month than what I was paying. If you’re reading this and you get cable or cable internet (especially if you’ve been a long time customer), call them up and see what they can do for you. You’d be surprised what deals magically appear…especially if you tell them you’re interested in cancelling your service!
Recently, too, I read that retailers are now willing to bargain. Think it was in the NY Times (??). The story said even clothing stores will sometimes come down on the price for people who ask.
That’s always been true of furniture stores. Never buy a piece of furniture without politely asking if they can do anything better for you. They don’t do it all the time, but when they do, it’s amazing — I got a Stickley table for about 35% off doing that!
Watch out for the due date even when you pay your cards off each month. The cc companies have a new trick. They charge finance charge on the average balance, if any portion of the balance is beyond the due date. If you pay the balance off, but pay it even one day late, it’s the same as letting the balance roll over into the next month. There’s no ‘grace period’ any more.
One place you’re likely to be tripped up is on expense reimbursement. I travel a bit try to wait until I get the company’s reimbursement check to pay off the card. Sometimes the check comes after the current months’ due date. So if I wait for the check, I pay the finance charge. Same thing if you pay 99% of the balance near the due day. The finance charge for this month would be based on the average daily balance.
If it happens once or twice, you can probably call and get the charges reversed, or the interest rate lowered. The best thing to do is to pay the charges during the month as they happen. That will keep the average monthly balance down, so if I need to wait until the next month to pay off a large bill, my monthly balance is lower.
That’s great!
I once saved over a thousand dollars in one 20-minute call by convincing the USAA credit card employee to drop my interest rate. I said I wanted to close my credit card and pay it off (it still had a huge balance).
They asked what ti would take ot keep me as a customer, and I said 5% interest (instead of 9.9% would help. He did it, and I wished I’d said 4%.
The funny thing is that I was bluffing. I neither has the money to pay it off nor did I have another account to switch the balance to.
I call. Every time. And when they say they can’t do anything, I tell them very calmly and very firmly that they CAN do something about it. I say: “I understand that you’ve been told that you can’t wave these fees, and you’ve been very polite and I don’t have any problem with the service you’ve given me, but you can wave the fee. There’s a little button on the screen, or you have a supervisor I can work with, but it can happen, and I just need you to work with me to make sure that it does.” And I ALWAYS get fees reversed or at least cut in half. It’s not that I have to do this often, but I do occasionally find that something went awry, whether on my end, or on their end.
This works for regular bank fees as well. I wrote a blog post a while ago telling people why they should get to know their bank teller, and this was one of the main reasons: if we have a regular customer who comes in, has a good history and accidentally gets an NSF one day, we will reverse it 99% of the time. People just don’t realise they can ask!
Some credit card companies aren’t doing this these days (a certain one that asks what sort of matter might be present in your pocket money-storage device, for example) unless you have your rate above a certain threshold or actually do pay it down to cancel. So be it, says I; there are other credit providers out there who want me. Even if you keep a zero balance, they profit from routing fees paid by merchants who swipe your card. Don’t ever let them convince you that your non-interest-payable balances are putting them into the poorhouse.
Another problem I have with some companies, including the one alluded to above, is that they do not report limit and maximum to the credit bureaus — only current balance, which is then taken as a maximum. In other words you show up as 100% utilization of that card whether you have $1000 or $15k on it. Not good for the ol’ FICO score. Go to annualcreditreport.com, do the dispute if you must, and they will sometimes fix and report it… so that limit will show up for a while and you just have to make sure not to load your card to that level again. Other cards I’ve had, such as WaMu and Barclay’s (Juniper) report correctly and are low-interest to boot.
I recently overdrew my checking account. The first time ever. I considered calling and asking for a reversal, but I used the experience as a moment of self-flagellation for allowing my account to run down so low in the first place. (I believe in punishment - divine or otherwise - for one’s poor choices in life). Good book keeping and accounting is a sure remedy for mistakes like that and while it did cost me, I won’t ever make the mistake of overdrawing again. Knowing that you can ask for a reversal is good to have in your back pocket, but it might make for having a lax attitude about maintaining your accounts to begin with. “Being able to ask for forgiveness doesn’t mean you’ll receive it, but it will make it more likely that you’ll do something that’ll make you have to ask.” Me!
Great Post! I had a similar experience with my web hosting company.
My credit card didn’t have the required $15 available for my monthly hosting fee and was declined. It took me a couple of days to get around to solving the problem but to make a long story short I went on the website and provided them another credit card number so they could process the payment (they check every day for funds availability).
For some reason they didn’t do it and after the 10 days grace period I received an email stating that I was gonna get hit with a $10 late fee on top of my hosting bill.
I immediately called customer service to ask for my fee to be waived otherwise I would go to the next available competitor, especially since if they went into my account they’d see that I did provide another credit card number. The rep on the line asked me to wait and when he came back, everything was ok. The $15 dollar fee was processed instantly (as we were on the phone) and that was it.
The whole thing took less than 5 minutes!
It’s interesting the amount of savings and deals you can get on things by just asking for them. I have noticed that a lot of people sit back and pay all kinds of avoidable fees.
I did something similar last week when I got a phone bill that was double what I expected. I blogged about it here:
http://www.carrielauth.com/blog/2008/03/two-things-interview-and-be-nice-in.html
Basically a 15 minute phone call saved me about $80. I took a leap and asked the customer service rep to make a service plan I signed up for retroactive. She didn’t do it, but she did issue a $50 cash back reward and she also reduced my bill substantially. Never hurts to ask!
Yes! I recently received a $280 bill in the mail from my wireless company. They dropped the bill down to $116 by making the new “flat rate” service plan retroactive for me. It took a 30-minute phone call and LOTS of convincing, but they did it. ALWAYS call, and don’t just ASK if they can do something for you: INSIST they do.
I did the same thing a few weeks ago. I had gotten signed up for a “preferred members” club, with a bunch of random perks for $90 a year, but I’m a freshman in college so I use my cc once a moon.
I called them up, and asked to be dropped from the program and get my $90 back, since I didn’t use it, and they almost cut me off offering to give back all the money. The phone call was at most 3 minutes.
Yup — I once paid all but $10 of a large cc bill and didn’t realize it until the interest charge appeared (math error paying out of two different accounts). I called, explain what happened. The customer service rep. tried to avoid reversing the interest charge. I pointed out that if they had REAL customer service, they would have realized what happened and checked with me.
Funny how they manage to figure out when fraud (which costs THEM more than me) might be involved, but a simple math error — no.
Also, we have a prepaid pack of flexibly-scheduled (we call and ask for games) sports tickets, and missed a game we had scheduled because of a snowstorm. The next time I called to schedule a few more games, which went beyond the # of tickets we had bought, I made a point of mentioning that it was a shame we had missed the game. Voila — free tickets.
I call all the time to see if I can get interest or fee deductions. The worst they can say is no and more than half of the time you come out ahead. I recently posted about reducing the rate on my student loans.
The NY Times has been reporting something similar on how haggling is slowly coming back to chain retailers:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/business/23haggle.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Good timing on this article. About two weeks ago I called and got my interest rate dropped on my credit card by about 11%. That got me thinking, so I called all of my utility companies to make similar requests. I had my ducks in a row, asking for long time/good customer rates, or anything else I could think of. NONE OF THEM WOULD BUDGE! I called Verizon Wireless, San Diego Gas & Electric, and Cox Cable. The lady I spoke to at SDG&E actually seemed a little insulted that I would even have the audacity to ask. I thought that was strange, but oh well. It didn’t hurt to ask
Like you, I am one of those phone shy types. If I have a choice between using the phone and the internet (which most of the time these days, I do), I always choose online customer service.
But unfortunately, online customer service just doesn’t always cut it. They often don’t read what you write and send back an irrelevant response and you just end up wasting your time.
I often procrastinate because I just really don’t like talking on the phone, but when I finally go and make the call, I often find that it’s not so bad after all (unless I get one of those reps who are trained to get you off the phone as fast as possible, and don’t want to help you or let you talk to the supervisor, which makes me really mad and is probably one of the reasons I hate using the phone to deal with companies).
Well, while we’re all sharing our savings, I recently posted about my hotel stay where I saved 22% just by asking for the “a corporate discount”. I DO work for a large corporation, but they didn’t ask for any proof of that.
That’s $20 in about 1 minute while I signed up for the room anyway, for a savings of $1200/hr
And actually I got it down to a total of a 30% discount since they gave me a smoking room instead of a non-smoking one like I asked. The secret words? “How about a discount?”
And to think, I’ve been paying full price on hotel rooms all these years! *bonks head on wall*
If you want to save money on long distance calls, do what I do. Rebtel. This service uses the internet to place your call to a LOCAL NUMBER that they give you. The recipient sees a local number show up on their phone. I call the US from Latvia (one of the costliest calls in the world) for pennies a minute now, instead of the Ma Bell overlord charge.
Here here!
Very great idea. It goes to show that you will be stunned at what you can get in life if you simply ask. This even works with the bank fee. The only option they use is ‘no’ for the reduction in the call.
Heck - I once asked the electric company to reverse a 30 cent late charge because I knew I had sent the payment on time and it must have been bungled by the mail. I could tell the lady on the end was thinking “what a cheapo”, but I just figured it was the principle of the matter. Plus, I wasn’t pushy - I just asked.
Three months later I was cleaning out my car and found my unmailed check that had fallen under my seat - Doh!!
Even better than calling is going there personally - this of course only works with things like cable and some wireless services where they have a local office. I had a friend who went to the local office and got them to reduce his cable bill without giving up any channels. I’m not sure what kind of logic he used on them, but I do know people generally have a harder time saying no face to face.
I recently moved and as I called each of my credit card companies to change my address and phone # i simply asked each one to lower my interest rate, every single one did because i always paid on time, one company even reversed a late fee that i had not nowingly incurred 4 months ago! it took about 5-10 mins on the phone with each company to get all of this accomplished. i suggest that if any of you have had a credit card with a company for about a year to call them and ask for a lower rate, the worst they could do is say no.
Why do PF bloggers always feel the need to translate money saving tasks into earnings per hour. We get it already. We can all do the math.
Re: Jon
Because it makes it more exciting and is a decent way of comparing the utility of doing something.
Amy Dacyczyn did this in her “Tightwad Gazette” and used it to decide (for herself) whether a particular money saver was worth her time. (ie: if she really only “made” $1/hr for her effort, it may not be worth it).
@BigBroodGander
“Because it makes it more exciting and is a decent way of comparing the utility of doing something.”
I think the excitement factor of dividing into 60 minutes is pretty low. My point being that $57 for 10 minutes is quite obviously worth the time. There is no need to try and beef up the story by performing elementary math for the readers.
I was a little confused by the title of this article and thought that the 10 minute call cost you $57 and would be about how to reduce your phone bills!
[...] you must have before you can spend it. I like the approach of spending only what I have, but as a reader at Get Rich Slowly pointed out, it is possible to track your credit card spending like you would do in a check register, and make [...]
Inspired by your post, I just called my credit card company and asked them to waive the $30 Overlimit Fee. I pointed out (nicely) that I have been a card holder since 2003, always pay early or on-time and sometimes two payments in a month, always pay more than the minimum amount, and that this overlimit was an accident caused by a large purchase. He agreed and said NO PROBLEM….then he tried to sell me on an Auto Loan! I explained I am trying to get rid of all my debt! Thanks for your great Blog ~ I have already acted on several other of your tips and can actually see the light at the end of the (albeit long) debt tunnel.
This was a wonderful post. I have seen this idea posted on another blog and was inspired to try it, I called my bank and asked them to waive a $28 overdraft fee from two months ago when I overdrafted my checking account by ONE CENT. They emphasized that it was a ‘one-time courtesy’, but they did refund me the charge! As a poor college student, it really made a difference. I would encourage other people to do the same - there is no harm in asking! The worst thing that can happen is that they will say no, but if you play your cards right it is very likely they will say yes if you have a good history.