Haggling Works: Try It, Save Money

As per ConsumerReports.org, many people aren't usually comfortable with haggling. Call it negotiation or something else but fact remains that haggling does save you more green. I was inspired to give it a try by Ramit Sethi's constant corroborations for haggling and to my surprise it worked. Let me share the stories with you:

I recently bought my new car and in the process I negotiated with 12 auto dealers. My strategy was to negotiate a price to lowest possible with a dealer and take this lowest price to the next dealer. Like this I saved approximately $2000 on my car.

Second incident happened today, saving me just $3 but this is an example that the service providers and business owners are out there to consider any negotiations put forth; only thing keeping it back is customer's hesitation to take the first step.

I recently tried HSBC's CreditKeeper program and liked it. After 30 days of trial period I gave customer service a call this evening and said "I am calling to cancel my membership". The rep said "I will certainly be able to assist you with this but would you mind sharing the reason so we may keep your business?" Once I heard this I knew that the ball is in my court and I fired it right away, "I know other services currently available in the market which provide similar products at reduced costs, do you think HSBC would be able to do something regarding this?" And then the rep said "Certainly, if we can keep your business by reducing the monthly charges from $9.99 to $6.95, I would be very happy to do this". Bingoooo ;)

All I want you to realize is your 2-3 minutes call can save you some real good money then why not give it a try. This technique has also (indirectly) decreased my auto loan interest rate by 2.70%.

All you got to do is

• speak up and be confident
• be proud and prepared to walk out of store if it takes to melt the sales rep down
  
• while negotiating always be polite
• survey the product/service you are haggling at other providers in the market

So let it be your showtime next time you shop for something. Be a victorious haggler :) Leave me a comment if you save even a penny, I would be happy to use your tips.

I'm in aBlog Carnival: This post was among the ones exhibited in Carnival Of Money Stories 2 at PT Money. Being part of the carnival and having yourself here today, have greatly boosted my energy. I would be glad to know about your thoughts on this post and my blog, hope to see you around :)

Why am I starting-up with this blog

So here comes my first post for this blog. After a bright winter, we eventually have a very pleasant warm Spring day today here in upstate NY, however, I couldn't keep myself from writing my first post.

I put-up my personal webpage (doesn't exist anymore) last summer so I could start a nice discussion hovering around Object Oriented Programming technologies. That couldn't go well as I lacked making efforts to regularly keep posting new articles. Then I started working full-time and one day, really don't know how but, landed at a nice blog that talked about personal financing tips. I liked the idea so much that I still keep up with tips to save money and how to always keep multiplying it. It didn't take much time for me to then start reading numerous personal finance advicing blogs and I became all indulged in the money matters ;)

After graduating from school I didn't get much chance to discuss technology issues as I used to get back then. So again the same very idea of discussion boards, blogs, personal webpages, ..... started lurking around me. For the past few days I was thinking should I really blog about what I always wanted to talk about, and guess what, that's what blogging is all about :)

So here I am, being curious, planning to do and communicate a lot through this great channel. When I think of where I want to see Let's Be Curious in one year I could think of regularly posted technical tit-bits concerning basics of OOP, specifically C++, no high-funda logics and conceptual nightmares but simple basics which I like myself to be introduced to again and again and again....

I will also try to continuoulsy post articles related to personal money management, savings, frugality, budgeting tips from time to time. Also recent graduates (begineer's) job postings for starters because I struggled a lot finding this job and now I am watching my friends do even more. And finally if I could keep upto it, interesting deals available :)

So here with this first post, I plan to start a wonderful journey of sharing and learning ... hope to see you back here again ... please leave me a comment what you think of the blog and things discussed here ;)