10 minutes saved me $325 for the year!

So, we added WAY too many minutes to our cell phone plan about 14 months ago. You know how it goes, at least with AT&T, they have a plan for $50 for 550 mins, $60 for 700 mins and then the next plan is $80 for 1400 minutes!!! We upgraded to that one because we went over a month or two (but for being customers so long, always paying on time, and just calling and asking, they took the $200 in overages away last year, woo hoo!). Anyways, in 14 months, we have accumulated over 8,300 in rollover minutes, i.e minutes we are paying for but not using! I had been looking online, and about 5 months, ago I was going to cut us back down to the 550 minute package, thinking, we'd NEVER go over with that many rollover minutes. However, when I went to change plans online, it said you can only keep as many rollover minutes as your plan is (meaning I'd go down to 550!). I said, NOPE and we kept paying too much.

Well today I looked at our past 6 months of usage, and only 2 months did we go over 550 (one was the month we had Micah, and one was Christmas) minutes, and neither were by very many. And since you can only downgrade once (of course you can always upgrade), I wanted to go to the cheapest plan. I mean, we get free minutes between ourselves, and anyone else with AT&T (both of our families are on it), and free night and weekends, so it's not like I sit on the phone all day during the day. But, instead of losing over 7,500 minutes, I decided to call AT&T and ask to keep more. I've been a long time customer, and pretty much anything you ask for you get when it comes to things like this. So I called, was only on hold for about 1 minute, told the lady what I wanted to do, said I would have done it online, but didn't want to only keep 550 minutes. I told her I wanted to call to see if I could keep more of my built up rollover minutes since I had been a customer so long, blah blah blah :). She said sure, how about 2,000. I said great, THANKS. I had to wait a couple minutes while she messaged her manager, he ok'ed it, and we were onto thank yous and goodbyes. So, I saved us $30/month, for the next 10 months: $300 for the year!

Wait, but your title says $25, what ELSE did you do. Well see friends, I'm a bit anal (ha, like some of you didn't know that). The other day when I was doing the ING deals, since I did them for the kids, and the account has to be linked to a person who isn't a minor (i.e. MY account)'s bank account, I had to switch money from Cara's and Micah's savings into mine, to then transfer to their respective ING accounts to get the free $25 each. I did so, copied the confirmation numbers into my Microsoft Money, as I always do, and thought I was done. When I went in to verify everything happened right yesterday, Micah's deposit didn't post to his ING, and I had a $25 NSF fee in my savings account, um, NO. (In case you were wondering why a small deposit would make us go $0 in our savings, it's because we don't use it as a savings, we use ING, etc, so this is basically an account we keep open with like $20 in it to use for transfers, etc) So, I called my bank, told them what happened, and before I even had to give them the confirmation numbers for all my transfers, etc, the lady told me she would refund the charge for being such a great customer. Gee, Thanks! :) So, instead of just letting it go and not wasting time on the phone (which was my first thought), I got the full $50 into, not just a net $25. And, (this may not be the norm) both phone calls were short, no to low waits, and easy!