Wee We Wins: My Calling

It’s been a long time since I wrote a blog post for my so immaturely named We We Wins series. Today, Dear Reader, we rectify what I am sure you will agree is a grievous injustice.

Cable bodied

Before discovering FIRE, I’d heard plenty of times that one should contact certain vendors, service providers and such to see about getting a discount on whatever that company provided you. This advice was most often delivered in the context of cable or satellite TV contracts.

That seemed a sensible recommendation, so I acted on it as to our satellite TV provider. And whaddyou know, it worked! I received a deal that would be good for some set number of months. Chuffed about my success, I made a plan to call the company near the expiration date of the deal to seek an extension. When I ultimately made that call, I achieved success #2.

Oh, baby.

I played this game successfully for the next few years, each time getting some deal or other. But then, one day, the vendor refused to play ball. The indignity of this company refusing to lower its market price for me! Can you imagine?! I called back a few times, thinking that if I just got the right customer service representative on the line, we’d right this wrong.

No dice.

Now I had a decision to make. Do I follow through on my somewhat hollow threat to switch to a new provider? Or do I put my tail between my legs and pay the full price?

I punted.

That is, I downscaled our service. That had the effect of decreasing what we paid (yay!), but also what we got (boo!).

Drop out

By this point, however, I was a year or two into being eyeballs-deep in reading about FIRE. And if you know anything about FIRE blogs, it’s that lattes and cable/satellite TV expenses are verboten. Well, not really, but you might get this sense from reading post after post about how people got rid of one or the both of those expenses as low-hanging fruit “unnecessary” expenses.

I’m all about getting rid of such expenses. But I don’t think that lattes and cable/satellite TV automatically fall on the list of them. If you really like one or the both of those things and they make your life richer, then keep on keeping on. You do you.

That all said, I’d by this point concluded that satellite TV was no longer doing it for me as much as it had in the past. Partly this was because The Missus and I were watching less and less satellite TV-provided content. The other factor was that with free TV, YouTube, and our streaming service subscription, we had access to plenty of great content for a fraction of the price of satellite TV, full price or reduced.

So we dropped our satellite TV contract entirely. We miss some content a bit (me: channels showing lots of live sports and Turner Classic Movies; The Missus: The Food Network and HGTV). Otherwise, je ne regrette rien.

By this point, I’d read enough to know to review, if not critically question, any bill/charge. I took to doing so with reckless abandon. And with successes both expected and, sometimes, unexpected.

Waive bye-bye

I’d also started travel hacking. In some cases, that involved opening credit cards with annual fees, which I’d previously avoided like the ‘rona plague. Some annual fees were automatically waived for the first year of having the card, and I’ve closed several of those cards before the fee kicked in. Other cards offered an annual bonus (potentially) exceeding the annual fee, and I’ve kept them. In two other instances, I got enough value from the card to justify paying the annual fee.

Which brings us to the wee we win that’s the focus of this blog post. One of those credit cards—a business card—has the biggest annual fee of all of my cards. I do not like that, Sam I am. While the card does provide an annual benefit, it’s worth only about 2/3 of the annual fee sum.

The annual fee was posted on my latest statement. So I called the credit card company to see about getting it waived. The customer service representative said that a full waiver was not possible. But he offered to look for a promotion that might be in the offing. And lo and behold, he found one that will have the effect of reducing the annual fee by half.

Score.

Probing to see if a full waiver for sure wasn’t a possibility, even if I said “pretty please,” I found that the half-off deal was the best I’d get. I decided not to look the gift horse in the mouth. I’m now not only paying less than I’d have paid but for making the call in the first place, but getting a positive value from the card when the annual benefit is measured against the reduced annual fee.

And in the end . . .

Dear Reader, I wasn’t hopeful about getting any break on the annual fee here. Similar efforts with some of my other cards earlier this year were met with polite, but firm, “no’s.” Pro tip: you have a better chance of getting the fee waived if you actually use the card. In the case of these cards, they’d long been dormant. But in this instance, the customer service representative I spoke with was both nice and proactive. As I’m sure we’ve all experienced, they’re not always like that.