Frugal win of the week: saving money on our internet bill

*after 12 months, your bill goes up to $64.99!

Frugal win of the week (FWOTW)!  Our Spectrum internet service promotional rate of $44.99 a month for 100Mbps internet for the first year just ended.  Suddenly our internet bill was about to go up $20 a month to $64.99.  Our internet service was under my wife’s account.  She called to try to get customer service to reset our monthly bill down to our previous rate.  The rep wouldn’t budge, even when she threatened to cancel.  The lowest the rep said that they could go was $49.99 a month, $5 more than our previous rate.  When asked why my wife didn’t want to accept the new offer, she said “why should I pay an extra $5 a month more than necessary?”  She cancelled the account.  I’m so proud of her for sticking to her guns.

5 minutes later, I called up Spectrum and signed up for the new member promotional rate for $44.99 a month.  Our internet was down for 30 minutes while I drove to the local Spectrum store to return the previous modem (free with service) and pick up a newer modem for my new account.  This is the second year we’ve had to cancel and re-sign up for new service to keep our rate down.  It really is a shame that many companies care more about adding new customers than trying to retain their current ones.    

I hope everyone reading this takes the time to negotiate their bills whenever possible.  If we left everything alone, we would end up paying an extra $240 a year.  We would rather save and invest that money instead!