Whenever you're looking for ways to cut your monthly budget, the dream is to find cuts you can make that don't feel like sacrifices. You want to save money, but you don't want to live like an ascetic monk. One of the more popular pieces of advice floating around online is to call up your current service providers and just ask them to lower your bill.
It's one of those tricks to save money that sounds nice, but feels like it probably doesn't really work, or at best, you might save a few bucks. Where I live, two of my utility providers have a monopoly in the state and a couple others have few real competitors, so I was sure I wouldn't be able to negotiate much in the way of savings – especially when my only reason for asking was just that I wanted to give them less money.
