FWOTW: another year of saving money on our internet bill

*after 12 months, your bill goes up to $65.991

It’s time to share another frugal win of the week (FWOTW) for our family!  

Every year, our internet service provider (Spectrum) gives us a new customer promotional rate that is good for only 12 months. Unfortunately, Spectrum is the only high speed internet provider in our area so we cannot switch providers.   We’ve been paying $44.99 a month (100Mbps) for our internet for the last year and our promotion is now over.  Our new bill was going to be $65.99, a $21 monthly increase!  I’d rather invest an extra $21 a month instead of paying more for the same service we already have.

When I checked out Spectrum.com, I saw that the current new customer promotion for high speed internet is still $44.99 a month for 12 months. I then called customer service to try to lower our monthly bill.  The representative offered to lower our bill to $54.99, a $10 increase from our current bill.  It’s a shame that these big corporations would rather reward new customers than try to keep existing customers happy.  Since the customer service representative could not match the new customer promotion, I cancelled our internet account. 

5 minutes later, my wife called Spectrum and signed up for the new member promotional rate for $44.99 a month.  Our internet service was down for 30 minutes while my wife drove to the local Spectrum store to return the previous modem (free with service) and pick up a newer modem for her new account.  This is now the third year that we’ve had to cancel and re-sign up for new service to keep our rate down. 

This simple act of canceling and re-signing up for internet will save us $252 over the next year!