Everybody Loves Your Money

Some friends of ours have decided to sponsor a family in need this year for Christmas.  It’ s no secret that there are thousands and thousands of families who are in dire need of assistance.  Everybody Loves Your Money has already donated to the fund and I wanted to offer all of my readers an opportunity to give what they can to help a family transition from being homeless to having a roof over their head.

The family that we are helping consists of a Mom, Dad, and three kids, a boy 9, a boy 13, and a girl 15.  From what I understand, they are just now transitioning from being homeless so I’m sure they can use all the help they can get.  The family lives in Oregon somewhere around the Portland/Beaverton area.

I hope that you’ll consider donating a bit to help this family realize that there is always hope, no matter how dire the situation seems.  Our goal is to raise $1000 for them.  That will be used for needed gifts from their list and will also provide money for food.  Anything that we raise above that will be donated to them in the form of grocery gift cards.

If you think about it, with the economy in the shape that it is, any one of us could find ourselves in situations much like this family’s.  I hope that we can raise enough money to help them feel hope and know that others in the world consider them to be important.

If you donate, please leave a note in the comments section to let me know how much you were able to give.  I’d like to post later about our final tally.

Here is a link to Paypal for your donation.  Anything helps.  Even if you can only donate $5, it’s worth it!

A couple of weeks ago I was over at my mother’s house and happened to ask her how much she was paying for her cable TV and Internet service.  I was absolutely SHOCKED to find out that she was paying $130 per month for the two of them.  My mother is not much of a TV watcher, but she does watch the basic channels.  She also doesn’t use her computer too much although I set her up with a wireless network and laptop last year so she can check her email and go on the web when she needs to from the comfort of the kitchen.  What I’m trying to say is that she’s a light user of both.

As we sat there talking about how crazy it was to have to pay that much for a couple hours worth of actual Internet surfing and maybe 30 hours of tv per month I asked her if she had ever called to ask for a better price.  I’m not sure why I asked her this question because I already knew the answer.  My mother absolutely hates to negotiate with people and would never dream of calling a company to ask for a better price.  I can’t say that I love doing it either, but when rewarded with significant discounts just for asking, I find the courage to make the calls.  (okay, maybe I like it a little bit).

Anyway, I asked my mother for a copy of one of her bills and took it home with me.  The next day I called her cable company and chose the option to cancel service.  From past experience I know that the people in the cancellation department have the most discounts to offer to keep their customers.  When I finally reached a customer service person I told her that we were considering canceling our service because we could get satellite tv and DSL internet service for only $55 per month from their competitor.  She did some checking and came back to offer 6 months of service for a total of $60 per month.  That included exactly the same services but was a promotional rate for 6 months.  Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get them to make it permanent.  I also discovered that my mother was paying for a premium service that she had never even used.  I asked them to remove that as well and got the bill down to $48 per month for 6 months.

It only took one phone call to put a very real $492 back in my mother’s budget for the next 6 months.  That’s an $82 per month reduction in her budget, just for making one phone call.  I think I’m going to sit down with her to review all of her other bills to see if there are any more opportunities.  I’ve always been very aggressive in minimizing our bills so we don’t have any savings like this that we can achieve.  While that seems like bad news, it’s actually pretty good news.  By actively watching our expenses, we save this kind of money every month (and then some).

Are you taking the time to really take a hard look at your bills?  Are there things that you can live without to save some real money each month?