Playing the “I’m Broke!” Card

Roughly once a year, I challenge you to try and save some money everywhere you can. Make a dedicated effort for a week and see what you can change with expenses you would normally call “fixed” (excluding groceries and shopping).

Here’s some examples from my attempt this year:

1. We were paying $165 a month for 2 phone plans. Called my phone company’s Customer Care and Loyalty Team to explain that I’ve been a loyal Telus  subscriber for many years, but what we are paying for our phones is too much. I explained that I shopped around in my local mall and found plans in the $50 each range, and since my hubby and I were both out of contract (on month-to-month), we were considering making the change to “the other guys”. At first, she offered me a great deal on more data (for more money) but I pushed back explaining that I wanted to make our bill cheaper. She put me on hold for 10-15 minutes and came back with exactly what I asked for, plus a little a month for some data. Overall, our bill each month will now be in the $135 range. It took 20 minutes of my day to save us $360 a year in our phone bills.
2. Called our insurance company and spoke to a really nice lady who I played the “we’ve run into some financial difficulties and could really use your help” card with. She went through line by line for us in our car insurance and found a 5% discount we weren’t using. She told us she had more wiggle in the house policy, so we took a look at that line by line too and she found a bit extra we could save on, and applied a loyalty discount on top for us. This short phone call was able to save us $150 more a year on our policies.
3. Found out Netflix has different subscriber plans… I did not know this. While their rates are going up next month (again), I dropped us down to the 9.99 tier (instead of staying on the 13.99 tier). Next step to save money would be to cancel it entirely…
4. My husband and I each have our own bank account, and then a join account we share. For each account we were paying more than $11 a month in fee.. that adds up!  I went in and whined and they helped me out in understanding the different account tiers and we dropped down to the lowest tier without any change to how we use the accounts (how many transactions a month you’re allowed). Now we will be paying $4 a month instead! 

In total, I probably spent a half hour on everything above and in one year, it will save us $810.