I’m interested in the cost of everything so I tend to track a lot of things, especially when it comes to my finances. As a result, I have all sorts of statements and bills either filed away or electronically saved on my computer from many years back. My most recent Comcast internet bill for August 2020 was $82.95 and it’s been that way since January 2020 when my $49.99/month promotional rate expired.
Not sure how many people regularly call their internet, cable or satellite provider when their prices go up or their promotion expires to request a discount, but I’ve been doing that ever since I started paying my own bills. At least that’s what I’ve been trying to do. Even though I haven’t been employed since March, I’ve been busy with school, family, house renovations and a bunch of other projects so I just kept pushing that calendar reminder back until today when I finally got around to calling Comcast.
There are different tactics and some good recommendations about how to lower some of your monthly bills, so you can google that at your convenience, but I just usually call saying I’m going to cancel my service because I found a better offer with a different company and the customer service representative will typically try offering me various deals to get me to stay.
Sometimes you get a good customer service representative who knows their stuff and makes finding the best discount for you easy, but other times it may take a second call to a different rep if you don’t think you’re getting the biggest discount they can offer you. You can usually get an idea of what’s the best offer you can get by just looking at their new customer offers in your area. This particular time Comcast offered me my same 200 Mbps speed at $50/month or $33/month cheaper than the $83/month I was paying for a contract term of 12 months, which is a savings of $396/year. For my benefit, I also asked them about the cheapest offer available at a slower speed and they told me I could get 25 Mbps for $30/month which would have been $636/year cheaper than the regular priced $83/month but decided against that for now since there was probably going to be a lot more working from home and remote learning in my household over the next several months.
Regardless, I’m saving $396/year on my internet bill over the next 12 months which is nice and I added a reminder on my calendar to call Comcast again in August 2021 to repeat the process. Like I mentioned earlier though, I have bills going back to when I started adulting, so I wanted to try to figure out about how much money I’ve saved on my home internet expenses over the years using this scheme. So I looked through my bills and created the table below based on my records.
For the past 9 years I’m calculating that I have saved about $2,590 on my home internet bill since 2011. #MoneyElite.
So if you’re still paying full price for internet, cable or satellite, now you know you don’t need to.
