THE NEGOTIATOR

Krista wheels and deals to save big bucks on monthly bills

KRISTA DAS SAYS SHE’S the girl every cable and Internet company hates.

Krista, thirty-three, makes a good living in health care communications, and lives in a beautiful brick high-rise condominium in the historic Mount Vernon section of Baltimore, Maryland, a mile north of the Inner Harbor. Her building has a twenty-four-hour front desk person, a doorman, and a valet.

But that doesn’t mean Krista is willing to accept high prices, either as a consumer or at work.

Every six months, Krista has a little chat with her cable company, and the result is always the same—she ends up with a lower rate.

“My cable company was trying to charge me $109 a month for two hundred channels plus HBO and Showtime, but I got it down to $72 a month for the same package,” Krista told me. “I go through a separate company for Internet because their rates are better even with my cable provider’s ‘special discount’ for a bundled package—$206 for cable, Internet, and phone combined per month for the first six months. Then the rate goes up after that. Ridiculous! Plus it gives me better leverage by having two companies that don’t want to lose a customer.”

One thing Krista has learned is not to select “billing” on the phone tree when she has her semiannual conversation with her cable company. When she did that, she got no for an answer.

“The representative was very rude and said that a $5 monthly discount was the best he could do. He told me that if I didn’t agree at that moment, then the deal was off. So I hung up and called back, but this time connected to the cancellation department.”

Krista had no intention of canceling her cable service. That wasn’t a good option because her building prohibits satellite TV and she didn’t have any other pay-TV choices. But she didn’t tell her cable company that.

“I simply explained that while I was happy with their service, my rates had become too high and asked if there was anything they could do to retain me as a customer. The representative was more than willing to assist and that is when he knocked $37 a month off my bill.”

Negotiating lower prices is pretty much the norm for Krista.

Not long ago, she was overseeing a complex print/direct-mail job on a tight time line. She received five bids, ranging from $11,000 to $16,000.

“The lower bids looked really enticing, but no one was familiar with their work or ability to deliver within the time frame,” Krista said. “If we didn’t meet the deadline for this direct-mail campaign, the company would end up losing a lot of money on product sales for that year.”

The high bidder was an outstanding printer, one that Krista knew would do a great job and do it within her tight time frame.

So did she pay the higher price for the top company? Nope.

“I went back to my top pick and asked for a price match. The printer wasn’t sure at first, but after some research, came back to me with a bid for $10,000, which was now lower than the lowest original bid . . . not only was the project completed on time, but the quality of the paper and assembly was better than we had ever seen in years past. Additionally, the printer saved the company over $2,000 in postage by suggesting that we make the height of the piece one inch shorter.”

Krista says she’s always had to negotiate with vendors at work, and whether it’s for herself or her employer, she wants to make sure no one takes advantage of her and she gets the best possible deal.

“A former boss heard me negotiating a contract once and said, ‘I am changing your title to chief negotiator. Can you talk to our CEO and renegotiate my salary for me?’”

Krista put her skills to work when she was looking for a good-quality point-and-shoot digital camera.

“When I went to the store, I had narrowed it down to two choices—one was a Samsung on sale for $212 and the other was a Sony on sale for $218. Against my better judgment, I ended up going with the one for $212 because I liked some of its features.”

Krista had the camera for two weeks and was not only dissatisfied with some of its features, but the lens jammed. So she took it back to get the Sony Cyber-shot HX10V for $218, but it was now $249.

“I explained why I was returning the Samsung and that I wanted to purchase the Sony for the price that it was listed at two weeks earlier. The salesperson couldn’t find any record of the lower price in the system and called the manager over, who also couldn’t find any record of it in the system.”

The manager told her that it could have been a rebate that the manufacturer was offering, but that there was nothing that the store could do about the rebate offer now.

“I asked them what they could do to discount the item, and the manager said that if they sold me the Sony for $218, the store would only be making 94 cents off the camera. I replied, ‘I understand. Well, I’m happy to pay $218. If not, I will just return the Samsung.’ He knew that I would take my business elsewhere and he caved in, selling me the camera for $218.”

Krista grew up in a small country town a half hour north of Baltimore and went to an all-girls prep school. She comes from a long line of savers, including her grandmother, who kept a spiral notebook of things she purchased, including french fries from Wendy’s and aspirin from the drugstore.

Her parents live in the same house they bought in the 1970s.

“My father, in particular, has always avoided debt like the plague. So for two years, my parents scrimped and saved, allowing each other to have only $5 each in spending money per week so that they could pay off their mortgage . . . and they did it. It only took them two years to pay off their mortgage.”

Krista started babysitting at twelve, and her parents made her open a savings account. At sixteen, her parents told her she had to get a summer job, so she became a lifeguard—and her parents told her she needed to start investing.

She opened her first retirement account at twenty-two after working in a nursing home and seeing how expensive end-of-life care is.

She bought her first condo on her twenty-fifth birthday, and sold it two years later for a 152 percent profit.

One area Krista likes to splurge on is travel.

“By taking control of my finances and keeping a close watch on where the dollars go, I am able to put that money towards things that I really want to do, like diving the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, seeing the pyramids in Egypt, and sailing the Greek isles—all things that I have done when most of my peers said they couldn’t afford to. But better than those nice vacations, I have peace of mind with the nest egg I’ve grown. When those rainy days come, I won’t be stressed, because I’m prepared.”

Friends always react favorably to Krista’s exceptional frugality.

“Everyone’s reactions are pretty much the same when I tell them about how I negotiate lower rates; they chuckle and then say, ‘I didn’t know it was possible to negotiate lower prices. Can you teach me how?’”

What can you learn from Krista’s story?

Pit the pay-TV providers against one another to lower your bill.

• When it comes to pay TV, many people now have access to four providers—two satellite companies, one cable company, and a monopoly phone company. Having all those choices makes comparison shopping pretty easy.
• Call each provider up and see if you can get their best offer in writing, or just watch the mailers with advertised deals that come to your home. Then pit them against one another and let them slug it out so you can get the best deal.
• As Krista found, you’ll get better results if you connect to the cancellation department rather than the billing department when you’re working the phone tree. Not making any progress with the phone rep you initially get on the line? Ask to speak to their supervisor and make your case.

Being unbundled offers a better position for negotiating.

• Bundling of pay TV, home phone, and Internet is not pushed as heavily as it once was, but I still want to warn you about the dangers of these package deals for your wallet.
• The practice of bundling handcuffs you to the phone and cable companies, usually with a minimum twelve-month contract. That makes you a prisoner when technology moves on in the marketplace. Plus, if you dump any one service in the bundle, the price on the other services can go crazy.
• As for whom bundling is actually good for, well, I’m sure there’s somebody out there. But my general advice is to run away from those bundle offers! As Krista pointed out, she gets more leverage for negotiation when she’s not in a bundle package.

Give Roku a try.

• A lot of my ultra-cheap readers might balk at Krista’s revelation of paying $72 for TV each month. But that does represent a savings of more than 30 percent just because she asked for it. Not bad.
• For the truly frugal among you, I’d like to recommend a little box called Roku. It’s an easy-to-use streaming player that makes it simple to access a massive choice in online programming.
• Roku devices sell for anywhere from $50 to $80. They hook up to virtually any TV in just a few minutes and connect to the Internet either wirelessly or via a hard wire to your high-speed connection. (Today, roughly four in ten of us have an Internet-enabled TV.)
• I was stunned by how easy Roku was to hook up and use. I tried it out and bam! Just like that I was up and running with simple access to my existing Netflix and Hulu Plus subscriptions. It truly is Internet TV for dummies like me who just want things to be easy.
• Paired with an antenna to pick up your local channels, this magic box will give you more TV to consume than you could possibly want or need. Visit Roku.com for more details.

Use artificial intelligence to find real deals.

• When it comes to buying electronics, I love Krista’s story of getting her camera for less than a dollar over what the retailer paid for it.
• If you want an easy way to see if a quoted online price for electronics is a deal or not, try websites like Decide.com that use price-analysis algorithms to alert you when a deal is really a deal based on historical pricing models.
• Another alternative would be to install a browser plug-in like GetInvisibleHand.com that automatically pops up an alert while you’re shopping if a better price is available on another website.
• Finally, Amazon customers can typically get a better deal on many items if they put something in their cart and then abandon it before the final purchase. That usually signals to Amazon that you’re willing to walk away and triggers a lower price the next time you put it in your cart to check out.