It Took 5 People, But We Are Saving $25 a Month

I just spend 40 minutes of my life on the phone talking about saving money on our cable bill to 5 different people, but it was worth it!

Remember a year or so ago we told you how we were going to pull the plug on cable but just before we did we ended up negotiating a $660 discount on our Dish Network bill?

That article explaining how we saved on cable costs is here.

In that article we mentioned that we were able to get a nice price break that was valid for one year; that year was over last month. This month’s bill had the new (non-discounted) cable fee. Ouch!

We don’t really watch a ton of TV, but we have favorites and didn’t really want to mess with switching to a lower package or going to a streaming service. I figured it was worth a shot to call and see if Dish Network would continue their excellent customer service and reward us for being such long time customers.

Like I said, it took conversations with 5 different people including the general customer service department, the sales department, a couple other people and finally Angie who is an “account specialist”. Angie listened to my concern and had me on hold for a few times while she did some checking. She came back and said she validated my account (I am not 100% sure what that means, but it is a term she used a few times) and could offer me a $55 discount for four months. It was a start, but I really (really) did not want to have to spend more time in 4 months calling back to talk pricing so I asked if there was something she could do more long term.

After a few more minutes on hold she came back and said she could extend a $25 credit per month for 10 months.

10 months @$25 = $250 savings

or

4 months @$44 = $220 savings

I picked the 10 month option, since we end up saving more money and time on the phone.

While we can’t guarantee every one of you can negotiate a better rate with your cable company, we wanted to share this experience with you as an encouragement to try. Last year Dish Network’s competitor Direct TV was courting us with special offers and I used that as a negotiating tool as explained in our previous post here.

Don’t be afraid to call and be a little pushy to try and save some money. After all the worst thing that could happen is they say no.

In our opinion, it is still a lot to be paying for cable and we may revisit the idea of cancelling our service – but for now we are happy to be saving the $25 per month.