Cost savings outweighed by hassle of change?

August 20, 2012 9:53 AM

Do you find that the hassle of changing vendors sometimes outweighs the savings you would receive from changing?

My phone (land line) and Internet (DSL) come from AT&T. TV comes from DISH. AT&T has been pummeling me with advertising for U-Verse, so I put together a spreadsheet to compare costs.

Apples-to-apples, I will save $30/month BUT ONLY FOR 24 MONTHS. At that point, I will pay more than I'm paying now.

If I change, I have to schedule a technician to come to my home and run additional cabling (for the U-Verse). I have to unplug and re-plug video/audio cabling which is difficult to access, anyway. I have to receive (and find something else to do with) a new modem they're going to send which I don't want, or expect to need. (Never mind the early termination penalty I'm likely to owe to DISH.)

There was a time when I probably would have seen all this as no big deal. But, I'm getting old and crotchety and don't feel like changing.

This is not a question about "should I?" or "shouldn't I?", but rather have you noticed a similar shift in your view over time? Is there a savings amount that will goad you to action, even though you may not feel like it? Is there something you tell yourself to salve any pangs of conscience about not jumping at the chance to save money?

posted by John Borrowman to work & money (12 answers total)

When I was younger I would bend over backwards to save a few bucks. And in some areas, like cell phone service, I still do - I switched to Simple because I didn't care about customer service and I could save about $30 a month. But I've also grown more averse to just the kind of needless changing as I've aged.

I would do the extended math based on assumptions about how long you plan to stay in your home. If the answer is that I would save $720 over the next two years but then spend an extra $600 over the subsequent two, I (speaking for myself) wouldn't bother. Too much hassle, not enough return to justify it.
posted by 1adam12 at 9:58 AM on August 20, 2012

Is there something you tell yourself to salve any pangs of conscience about not jumping at the chance to save money?

"I'm not actually saving money" helps. You've clearly figured out that this offer is, in the long run, going to cost you more money than it's going to save. I'm not sure why anyone wouldn't do the math on this, but I am 100% sure that many, many people do not. The fee and advertising structure for any and every utility would look completely different if people sat down and actually figured out whether that free toaster is worth the new bank account. But they don't. By that metric, a situation like this is the companies not pulling one over on you. You've outsmarted them. Well, for now, at least; they always win the war.
posted by griphus at 10:00 AM on August 20, 2012 [1 favorite]

Oh, hey, I forgot the important part of the "I'm not actually saving money" thing: time. You will waste time on scheduling (and re-scheduling, and re-scheduling) the technician, time on following up if they screwed something up, time on trying to figure out how to return all of their equipment to them and make sure it's reflected on the account. Time on everything.
posted by griphus at 10:05 AM on August 20, 2012 [2 favorites]

Do you find that the hassle of changing vendors sometimes outweighs the savings you would receive from changing?

As most people get older, they get wealthier. The increase may not be much, but it is the common trajectory.

As most people get older, they also find that they tend to value their time more highly. This is related to the first--most people make more on an hourly basis at 50 than they did at 20--but also probably something to do with changing perceptions of time that come with maturity.

Regardless, it's pretty uniform for young people to value money more than time, because they tend to have very little of the former and plenty of the latter. Or at least it seems like they do. But as people get older, many of us find that we start to value time more than money. We have more of the former than we did before, but no more of the latter. Sometimes apparently less.

So yes, there are absolutely things I will pay people to do for me now that I would never have ten years ago. Part of that's because I can afford to, but part of it's also because I simply don't have time to do everything.

Recent example: I just shelled out a painful amount of money to a moving company. Why? Because I had to get all of my stuff across town and I needed to do it on one particular day. There was no way my fiancee and I could possibly schlep it all in that amount of time, and there's some stuff we might not have been able to move at all. Ten years ago, I'd have called in a bunch of friends and relatives and sort of caught as catch could. Would probably have been a multi-step process taking several weeks. Last month, I dropped money on three guys and a truck. Still took like seven hours, and it cost a pretty penny. But way less than the price I'd have paid not to carry all that stuff down three flights of stairs.
posted by valkyryn at 10:18 AM on August 20, 2012 [11 favorites]

The answer is Yes.

The way to look at it is the power of $720. You can use that money to potentially generate additional cash and savings. It's the opportunity the money affords you, not necessarily the actual amount.

In 24 months time, you may be offered incentives that further extend your cash. Pseudo-utilities such as these are only going to face increasing competition, and the incentives will remain attractive.
posted by Kruger5 at 10:19 AM on August 20, 2012

I use a cost estimate on my time. I usually work it out at about $10 - $20 bucks an hour but as my income has increased recently I should probably up that figure a little now, anyway I work it on the whole idea of if it's going to take 5 hours to do then I am going to need to save more than $50 to make this thing worthwhile.

So by that estimate the $30 bucks a month saving is probably something I would do, but you have to take into account the unknown factors, if you are happy with the service you have or your life is crazy busy or you just can't be bothered why bother, there is no rule saying you have to save money just because you can. If you value your time and the lack of stress then just do what makes you happy.

Now when I've been really broke I have worked my ass off to save $10 here or there and I would do it again if needed.
posted by wwax at 10:21 AM on August 20, 2012

Hell yes. I did the math on how much it would cost me to move into a 1-bedroom apartment (I have a 2-bedroom and gave up on trying to find roommates when all I was getting were spammers from Australia). There wasn't a whole lot of difference between the two apartment prices, and dear lord, it wasn't worth the hassle of doing a new first/last month/deposit on a new apartment, plus the stress of moving.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:49 AM on August 20, 2012

Apples-to-apples, I will save $30/month BUT ONLY FOR 24 MONTHS. At that point, I will pay more than I'm paying now.

Well for starters, that's $720 plus tax in total, which for me is worth a little hassle. I mean, you could pay a local geek kid $20 to come in and run cables for you if you want and still come out $700 ahead.

However, with that said, the threat of changing services is often enough to get a cable company to give you a deal, so why not use the first offer to leverage the same rate at your current provider? Seems like the best of both worlds.
posted by Rodrigo Lamaitre at 10:56 AM on August 20, 2012 [1 favorite]

As has been pointed out, your time is worth something. I generally shop carefully for services like these and only shop again when a) the price goes up substantially and/or b) the service gets worse and/or c) my needs change.

With commodity services like telecomm, cable, insurance, etc. you can figure that the major players are going to be close to each other in cost and price.

But then I'm pretty jaded because I've bought these services at work and done fairly major (at least to me) deals on these kinds of things for years. Also, 90% of the telemarketers I get at work are pitching one of these things. If I took the time to seriously consider all these offers I would never get anything else done, at home or work, so I've just had to make it a rule. For work-related situations I will also add (d) when my boss tells me to.

As a related aside, I despise "YOUR PRICE IS ONLY $XX.xx for three months and then everything will turn to shit" offers and will not reward companies for doing it, even though I could probably save 50% on my cable bill by switching between the two providers in town every 6 months. It also makes things more confusing when I *do* need to make a change, as I now have to ask (repeatedly) "how much after the promotion?"
posted by randomkeystrike at 11:01 AM on August 20, 2012

If U-Verse is new in the area, let me warn you that you're basically doing bug testing.

When U-Verse went live in Houston, I was able to get a great deal. It also went out twice a month as they figured out [random technical junk]. That said, you could always call up your current provider and tell them about this great offer. See if they have any customer retention policies.
posted by politikitty at 12:02 PM on August 20, 2012

That said, you could always call up your current provider and tell them about this great offer. See if they have any customer retention policies.

FWIW - Whenever I see DISH offering "Free HBO", or other similar promos for new customers, I ALWAYS call and ALWAYS get it for myself. Not sure if that's my lengthy tenure as a customer (10 yrs or thereabouts), or what. Hard to imagine getting those breaks from a vendor who is hustling to recoup the price-break he's just extended over the previous two years.
posted by John Borrowman at 12:13 PM on August 20, 2012

I do lots of research in the early stages to get the best deal I can from what's available at the time. I try to predict where possible how things will go over the long term (ie avoid obvious gimmicks) but once I'm signed up I can't be bothered shopping around and it would take a lot of hassle or substantial cost increases to make me change over. So the chance to save money is not worth much, once I've made my decision to pay $x to begin with.

That said I avoid signing any long term contracts if I can avail myself of a pre-paid or month-by-month arrangement instead.
posted by EatMyHat at 12:53 PM on August 20, 2012