Today, I learned an important lesson about negotiating. A family member asked me to help her with her AT&T bill because she thought she was spending too much on her phone service, and after taking just a quick look, I realized that there were savings of $80+ just by cutting out unnecessary services. I’m not talking about optional services; it’s not my job to judge how people spend their money, if they think browsing the Internet on their phones is necessary, that’s their prerogative.
The $80 in savings was based on simply dropping services that were on the account but were never used. 3 of the accounts on the family plan were to enable international calling, even though nobody had been out of the country in the past 6 months. One account had unlimited Internet usage on it, although that person never used the service, and the family had 10,000 rollover minutes because their 3,000 minutes-per-month plan was simply too large.
A 20 Minute Phone Call Saved Us $40/Month!
By activating the free AT&T A-List feature (free calls to any 10 numbers on any network) and decreasing the monthly service to 2,100 minutes, they were able to save $30 each month. The international plans were dropped, saving another $15 per month (plus another $40 for charges from previous months that they were able to drop), and the Internet savings added another $10. All that adds up to $55, just by looking over the bill! I encourage you to look over your monthly bills every few months, there could be big savings just by dropping unused features!
