I don’t know about you, but I’m not made of money. I do however like money and having a bit more of it every month by either making more or spending less is always some kind of wonderful. That’s why I’m thrilled that my husband got our wireless provider to give us a better rate and wait for it—a better plan. Say what? That’s right, as of a few hours ago we are now paying $50 less a month for our cell phone plan and we get more for the money too. The whole thing took him about 10 minutes to do.
So how do you get your wireless provider to give you a better rate? The short answer is threaten to leave and mean it, but be prepared to stay. Here’s the long answer in 5 easy steps:
- Take a good look at your wireless plan and see what you get for what you pay.
- Shop around online with other companies with similar or better plans that charge less than what you are paying. Bonus: keep an eye out for ones that will pay your transfer fees.
- Armed with the info of these better deals that are available to you, call your wireless provider and find a way to speak to the cancellation, I’m outta here, or whatever it’s called department.
- When you get an actual living breathing representative on the line, nicely say “I am considering cancelling my service because So-and-So company is offering me a better deal, but I wanted to see if you could match their deal or give me a better one before switching.”
- The rep will then likely ask you to give them the details of the deal(s) you are speaking about and then do some wizardry on their end to try and give you something comparable. Next thing you know you are saying thank you very much and wondering why you didn’t call sooner.
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Here’s the thing, if your wireless company cannot lower your current plan rate, you’ve already done the research and know that you can get a better rate elsewhere, so go ahead and switch providers just make sure you don’t cancel your current service until after speaking and securing the whole transfer deal (so you can keep your phone number) with the new provider.
You stand to save a good chunk of change by following these steps regardless of whether you get the deal from your current wireless provider or get a new one.
Whatcha gonna do with all the money you save?
Image via Unsplash
Here’s my results: ATT and Verizon now push customers into programs that basically give you a phone and have you pay it off over two years. This makes it difficult to switch. Also, switching carriers means switching devices (six of them, in our case), since one carrier won’t cover the other’s devices, so that’s out for me. Verizon did offer us a total of $1200 credit (over three months), but since I’m still paying for two phones, it’s just too inconvenient to go through all of the trouble. That said, the ATT Chat operator did find a way for me to save more than $100 in data overage fees from the past year or so. They have a current (brief, July only) offer for customers who’ve been with them for years, and they’re crediting us an extra 5 GB to use to cover those overages. I felt appreciated, and I think they did what they could. Thanks for the prompt to call.
Yeah, I’m not into paying for the phones over a 2 year period and I tend to keep my phones for as long as possible because I don’t want to renew our contracts. I’m glad they offered you the extra GB.
We ended up switching to mobile share for our data and it’s 10GB now and costs less than the 8 GB we were paying for before plus the mobile share has rollover data.
That’s what we have, too.
Timely post for me. I’ve been looking at options, thinking about options, then putting it off until maybe next week. Well today I decide to take action. It appears Verizon wanted to keep me after all. Now I online chatted with two online reps, talked to two other (800 calls) reps before the upgrade fees were waived and my plan changed to more for less.
You really do need to push back with them. After one gave me a lengthy reason for their upgrade fee policy, I told the rep that their policy reason is of no concern to me. Then I went on to explain my reason I should not need to paid an upgrade fee.
However all this back and forth took much more than 10 minutes.
I thank the government for blocking the merger of ATT and T-mobile – the competition is good for us all.
Well, I’m glad you took action. I’m telling you I think my husband has a gift for these kinds of things because I swear it always goes smoothly for him and when I try it just isn’t quite as smooth.