How To Save Money: Word For Word Scripts You Can Use Now

Good evening. And tonight we are going to be talking about word for word scripts that you can use to save money. Right now, I'll tell you what, I'm just going to give you the scripts first and then I will tell you how to use it. So here is the script you can use. Pick up the phone call and save hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Right now. This is what you tell. Hi. I'd like to discuss my options with you. I've been a good customer for three years and COVID 19 is making it tough for me to continue my usual payments. I'd like to discuss your help with my options. What happens in this script? What this is telling companies is I know you've spent hundreds or even thousands of dollars to acquire me as a customer. I know that you are taking a massive hit revenue and profits right now. I know that you want to collect any bookings or any revenue that you can and you also want to invest in your customers so that when this, when we come out of this, they are still your customers for the long term. In other words, it's business. So you talk to them, you see if they can work with you. Sometimes they can and I'm going to tell you about those situations and sometimes they can't and that's okay as well. They are under no obligation. But some companies are certainly helping out quite a few people. So this script is a slight tweak from the scripts in my book where I cover scripts about credit cards, late fees, bank fees, all kinds of stuff. But right now, even using the word COVID 19 can often activate script certain responses from companies. That is why I put that in the script. So let's zoom out and let's talk about how this applies to your money and then I will tell you the types of places that you can call that are getting results from my readers. First off, most advice out there about saving money starts by saying take a look at your entire house and go through it with a fine tooth comb and cut 2% on everything. Something cost 25 cents. Cut 2%. Something cost $2,500, cut 2%. I don't want to do that. It's like cleaning out my garage with a magnifying glass. No, thank you. I'd rather find the three to five big wins, negotiate those and then think of other things I can do for my money. So I'm going to give you a framework that we use that I will teach you to be rich. And that is the CEO strategy C for cut costs. You're familiar with Those E for earn more. Most people never really talk about that. Why? Because they don't know how. And O for optimize your existing spending. Alright, let's go through them all. And again, you can use these scripts with a variety of different places. So C, Cut costs. What is my advice here? Well, as soon as this happened, coronavirus, I started to get emails and DMs from people saying, you know, what should I be cutting back on? And I have a wedding in August. What do you think I should do? And my answer was, you got to accept reality, make a plan and move. And personally, I think you should cancel the wedding. And as somebody who has been married and planned a wedding with Cass, I know how painful that is. But at this time, having money in your pocket is more valuable than having money in your pocket later. So even if you incur cancellation fees, cancel. Okay. You have to avoid that sunk cost fallacy. And so cutting costs means taking a look at any potential big expenses that you have planned for the rest of the year and really seriously considering canceling them. Vacations, trips, in that person's case, unfortunately, their wedding. It also means, you know, the obvious things if you're not spending on them, things like a gym, etc. And I hate to say that too, but there are things that you have to be realistic about. And if it means that when you go to rejoin your gym you have to pay a hundred dollar sign up fee, so be it. Money in your pocket now is worth more than money in your pocket later. You can deal with those issues later. Okay, so that's C. You intuitively know what you can cut back on. If not, you can use the work in chapter four to go through, find the biggest expenses and cut them. E for earn more. Alright, so I've talked about it occasionally here. As you know, I have several programs teaching people how to earn more. I want to share this example that just happened a few days ago. So a few days ago we have a program called Earnable and I was doing a live presentation with my students and one of my students said that she has launched a program to help people paint through Zoom. So you know those things where you drink wine and you paint and I don't know, people go there on romantic dates. She's doing it with Zoom and I loved it. I loved the idea and we did a little tweaking on the positioning and I shared how I would simplify the offer, but in general it was great. I said do it. And she wrote me and said, I launched it through Instagram And I made a hundred bucks the first time. Amazing. If you can make a hundred bucks, then you can make a thousand. And if you can make a thousand, then you can do it regularly. So this is what we teach in earnable. And this is one of the crux behind I will teach you to be rich. Don't just focus on cutting back, but really expand the pie. Remember that there are so many, many things people need now. They need something to keep their kids busy, they need lesson plans, they need entertainment. People need entertainment as adults too. Oh, it's Friday night. What are you going to do tonight? Same thing I did every night. What if we get a board game to play with our friends? What if we get a wine and painting class? Great. So we can show you how to do this. But I want you to basically think bigger and start thinking, what can I offer that might actually expand the pie and earn more. Of course with earning more, there's starting businesses, there's negotiating salaries, and there's many other strategies that you can use for e earn more. A couple of them that people neglect right now. If you are unemployed, file for unemployment. You should take advantage of the resources made available to you. If you are a business owner, file for everything that you are eligible for, PPP and everything else. Speak to your accountant. These are opportunities made available to you. You should take them. And I know it's difficult. There are some people who have been writing me who as recently as two weeks ago, three weeks ago, were fully employed, great jobs and suddenly they don't have a job. And it can be very psychologically devastating to go from high earning job to not having anything. And again, I go back to that framework that I offered several weeks ago. Panic is bad, but overreaction is good. You gotta take an honest look at what's going on, make a plan and move. And if that means you are unemployed recently, it's likely not your fault. And if it doesn't matter, the point is, what's the plan? What are we gonna do? And my high recommendation for you is file for unemployment as quickly as you possibly can. Alright? That's another way on the E earning more. Now let's talk about o optimizing spending. Something that is highly neglected. I remember when I started way back, way, way back, I was writing I Will Teach youh Be Rich. And I did this thing called the Save $1,000 in 30 days challenge. And there were so many people who were so pissed off. Ramit must be nice. I don't even earn a thousand dollars a month. You Suck. You're so elitist. And I was like, what is your problem? Okay, you don't earn a thousand dollars. Do you earn 500? Could you apply the same principles from the Save a Thousand Dollars challenge and maybe, just maybe, make it the Save$500aMonth challenge? I don't know if. Is it crazy to think that perhaps if I'm getting free advice, maybe I can adapt it to my own life situation? Oh, no. Ramit, I need you to fly to my house in South Dakota, and please give me the custom advice for me. Ramit, why aren't you doing that? You're so elitist. Why don't you fly here? I decided that I would rather not live a life full of serving freeloaders who have the intellectual capabilities of a gnat. And instead, I said, I'm gonna serve the people who can apply my material to their life situation, hence these videos. No, I can't fly to your house in Tallahassee. However, I can do a bunch of videos, free and premium, and you can choose what level of engagement you like. Cas, what you think? Is it a good strategy? I don't know.

Let me just zoom in again.

I think I'm sweating. Where was I? Oh, optimizer spending. Okay, let's.

Let's just go back.

Let's bring it back. So we all have areas of our life that we're already spending on. Now, what if we could optimize that spending? It turns out that with a little bit of optimization, you can actually save quite a bit of money. And frankly, a lot of my readers go through some of these steps, and they're able to save 30 thousands of dollars with a few phone calls and tweaks. Again, this is money you're already spending. So how are you going to do it? Let me give you some advice. Okay, so let's start with the easy one. If you have car insurance, you're not driving as much. A lot of car insurance companies are offering discounts right now. Call them up, you'll save a few hundred bucks. Done deal. The bigger win from that is not necessarily the money, because the money is relatively small. It's the fact that a lot of you don't believe this actually works. Ramit. Yeah, maybe if I had the magical words you do, then I could do it. But I don't know. Like, you know, I don't use geico. I use this, and it's some weird thing. No, the benefit here, even if you only save 10 or 20 bucks, is you make that phone call, you go Whoa. They actually just refunded my money or they just waived that fee. I just got a credit of $250. And suddenly, for the first time in most people's lives, you realize you have agency. You have some amount of control over your money. You see, for most of us, we've grown up where the bank is, the same bank our parents use. So we just have it. And somebody raises our interest rate and we just pay it. And then somebody gives us our pay, we just accept it. But I'm teaching you how to take control, even if it's five or ten dollars. And that's a magic moment. So call your car insurance company up, then your cable company. Times are tough. I'm having trouble. If indeed you are, what can you do? I'd like to discuss options. How can you help me out? Boom. A lot of them save hundreds of dollars a year right there. Now it's starting to add up. Your credit card company. Call them up. Oh, you didn't follow. I Will Teach youh to Be Rich. And you got into credit card debt, and you have an $11,000 balance at 14.99%. Time to make that phone call. Many credit card companies now are holding off. They're allowing you to pause payments at least for a couple of months. No fees, make sure you're paying no finance charges, no interest. And some of them are, you know, I show you in the book. How do you lower your apr? Don't forget to ask. I have people who lower their APR by huge amount. And the bigger your balance, the more you can save. So call those credit card companies up. Student loan payments. This is a huge deal. The bigger your student loan is, the more people ignore it. Don't do that. Don't put your head in the sand. The loan is not going away. So if you call them up, they're going to work through your options. And student loan companies are often doing things as well. I've heard a lot of stories from IWT readers. Also remember, most of you have never gone to a student loan payoff calculator. Google that. Student loan payoff calculator. You can type in how much you owe, you can type in your interest rate, and you can simulate if you paid an extra 20 bucks a month, 50 bucks a month. For some of you, an extra 50 to $100 a month would save years off your total debt payoff. So I want you to take control. Don't just let them decide. Those companies want you to stretch it out and pay more in interest. No, you decide. And if you need to put those payments on pause again, no finance, no interest charges, because the cash is more important to you right now. Talk to them about it. See what options they'll give you. Finally, rent. Yes. Some landlords are even being flexible. Call them up, say, look, this is the situation. What can you do? Work with me. And some landlords are doing a variety of things. They're pausing payments, they're waiving payments in some very rare cases. But you need to make a phone call to zoom out. Again, why would any of these companies work with you? Because they spent a lot of money to find you. They know that it's better to collect some than to collect none. And they know that when this recovers, they want you to stay. They want good customers who stay for a long time time. So that is the psychology here of making these phone calls. Now, as we wrap this part up, we can go to some questions. Cass, if people have got them, they can type them in the question box. Yes, and we will answer those. But overall, I just want to just re emphasize that main point. You know, there's a lot of advanced things that I talk about in my material when it comes to, you know, once you've got a substantial amount in your portfolio and what are all these things you can do and investments and all that stuff? We also talk about some of my students. I feature them sometimes. You know, this person made $200,000 last year with their side business. Okay, great. But you can see that it all starts with something as simple as a phone call, something as simple as calling up one of the companies that you pay regularly, your cable company, your cell phone company, and saying, hey, what can you do? Work with me. And that phone call is so intimidating to people, and yet when you take control, you will be surprised at the kind of results you get. As you can probably tell, this isn't just about money. It's about taking control in all parts of your life.

Cass, do these scripts also work by email or only calling?

They work by email sometimes, but it's better to do the phone call. Why? Because, number one, you can get escalated. So if they say no, you say, okay, can you transfer me to your customer retention department? And two, I just. I hate the idea. Especially, you know, Gen X Millennials, the idea that we can only do things by email. I hate these stereotypes about younger generations. Like, I'm young. I still use the phone if I need to. Although of course, I prefer texting and email sometimes for negotiations. You always want to have voice communication. So whenever I did a Salary negotiation. Whenever I did any kind of cell phone type, you know, that kind of negotiation, always on the phone. You will become a better negotiator by listening and reading the intonation and if possible, the body language of the person you're speaking to.

Okay, so this woman booked a flight. Flight and a cruise. And they won't give her refund, will only give her vouchers. How would you respond to get the money back?

Okay, I have two things to say. So first off, you should. You probably got a lot of time right now, so you can actually pull up all the terms that you agreed to and read through them. And I say that because there's a lot of companies that are really trustworthy, and generally they do the right thing. But once in a while, one of their customer service reps might make a mistake. Take. However, airlines are not those companies. They will screw you at every opportunity. In fact, they're almost built to do that. And so there are so many reports of companies where the. The airline screws them until somebody from the New York Times writes them and says, hey, why'd you do this? I'm a consumer reporter. And you did like, oh, sorry, I don't know how that happened. Yeah, you know how it happened. You built up your KPI so that. That customer service manager made that happen. So step one, read through your terms. But step two is they may have actually put that in the terms. So there, if that is the case, they're under no obligation. So in that case, I really want to emphasize this point. They're under no obligation to help you out. If it's not in the terms, then that's that. And so you have to accept that that is part of negotiating. It's not knowing that you can ask, but if they're not entitled or required to do it, they don't have to.

What? We're about to start apartment hunting. Any tips on negotiating rent before signing a lease?

Oh, yeah, I would. I would be negotiating hard because nobody is moving right now, and you can do a variety of things. I actually had somebody who just wrote me. What did he do? He saved, like, thousands of dollars in one year. I think he offered to prepay the next two months. So depending on how much you have, you can do all kinds of stuff. First off, you need to put yourself in the mind of this landlord. They're losing money. They're desperate to have somebody in there, and nobody wants to rent right now, depending on where you are. So you have a lot of leverage. So what can you do? You can Say, look, first off, here's the comps for other places. I think you're priced too high. This is my offer. And. Or you could say I'm willing to pay 6 months or 12 months in advance right here in order for you to knock off, let's say, two months of rent. Right? Cash in the bank. Here you go. Take it right now. Of course, the best option when it comes to negotiating is having other options. So if you've got other places, you don't fall in love with this place. It's. If it's just an apartment, that would be your best opportunity to get a good price.

All right, how to negotiate savings on educational programs you're trying to join.

Like what? I don't understand that question. I don't know. Okay.

What fragrance does Ramit wear?

What is this, like, serial killer night tonight? What fragrance?

He's all natural.

What. What kind of. What's the. Okay, wait, hold on. What is the creepiest questions that someone could ask?

Oh, my gosh. People have been asking where we are, which is really creepy.

We're in front of a fireplace. What's wrong with you? Yeah, you freaking creeps.

No, they want to know, like, where we are.

Oh, where are you? Oh, no. Why do you want to know? Oh, no reason. No reason. Just curious.

We're on planet Earth, that's where.

You remember what happened with that photo we posted once? Okay, listen. I posted. I posted this photo. We went on a hike in Puerto Rico, and it's in a rainforest called El Yunque. So we have a photo. It's literally us with trees behind us. There's nothing identifying. Okay, and we post it. Within 30 minutes, somebody goes, el Yunque. I was like, what? I was like, the NSA doesn't know shit compared to Instagram. These guys are crazy. You guys are crazy. And now you're asking my fragrance? Why do you want to know my fragrance? Oh, no reason. I just want to wear your skin like a raincoat. I don't think so.

That's creepy. Okay, was it.

Was that a man or a woman? Who asked that, by the way?

I can't tell.

That's pretty funny.

My company is offering voluntary layoffs. Severance is one week per one year of service. What are your thoughts?

I don't want to speak about this because I'm not expert enough. So, unfortunately, I'm going to pass on that one. Okay.

Advice for people who feel super behind. 30 years old. No savings, 40k and 401k.

Okay, let me restate the question so everybody hears it. Again, I feel behind. What is your advice? I'm 30 years old, no savings, but I have $40,000 in my 401. Okay, this is a great question. How many people here feel behind? Like maybe you graduated with a lot of debt, maybe in your 20s you just didn't care about buying New York Times best selling book I Will Teach youh to Be Rich and following every single piece of advice, even though only would have taken you six weeks. Anybody here, anybody make the biggest mistake of their life financially? Okay, that's okay. I have compassion. As long as you're watching now, fine. We're all friends, so I'll give you the truth. I'm not gonna blow smoke up your ass. If you missed your 20s or 30s and your opportunity to save and invest, it's gonna be much, much harder. Why? Because the time that compounds from your early 20s is incredibly powerful. It's almost unstoppable if you start investing back then. However, most people don't. Okay? Now, I'm not saying you want to follow the path of most people. I certainly don't. But we should also acknowledge that, you know, most people just don't think about that stuff in their 20s. Okay? So the best thing we can do is focus on where are we today and what can we do going forward? So if you are 30, you have no savings, the single best thing you can do is to get extreme, extremely aggressive about your income, your savings rate and your investing rate. And that means you need to get very honest with, do you have a job that is paying you the kind of money that you need to hit your goals? Oh, you don't even know what your goals are yet. So you need to start read the book. You need to go through and decide, like, what kind of life am I going to live? If your answer is, you know, I want to fly on jets, that's probably not going to happen. If your answer is, I don't know, I just want to be comfortable and like go on vacation. I want you to get a little bit more specific. Okay? You're 30. That's that time where you could just be like, I don't know the time. If you want to actually save and get ahead now, you need to have a vision of where you want to go. There are lots of things you can learn from this and other sources. You can learn, for example, about the 4% rule. You can learn about how much you need in retirement. You can learn how much you need to make to live a certain lifestyle. These things are all findable. They're Searchable. So let's just say that you decide you need to make 100k a year. Let's just say, and right now you're making 75k a year. Okay, that's a big jump. So what are you going to do to go from 75 to 100? There certainly is a path to do that. Are you going to change jobs? Are you going to change industries? Notice that I'm leaning forward. I'm saying, what are you going to do? Tell me your plan, think about it. And most people at this point will go like this. I don't know. I'm. I don't know. There's no way I could earn that. I'm not sure. I just have no idea. And when I work with students like this, one on one, I'm very patient. But I'll say, well, you tell me, what are some options? What would you advise someone else who is making 75k and wants to make 100 and suddenly boom, their brain unlocks and they get out of their own individual situation and they start saying things like, well, I'd go on LinkedIn, I'd go talk to people who graduated from my college, my alumni, I would go find out what kind of jobs even make 100k, and I'd find a way to start doing that. And on and on and on. Okay, notice that I'm focusing on the income part because you can save more and you probably should. I'm sure you overspend in certain areas, but if you truly want to catch up or get ahead, your income is going to have to go way up. Alright, so that is the first place I would start. Beyond that, I would set up automatic savings. Clearly you don't have it because otherwise you would have been saving even 100 bucks a month over the last few years. So you need to set those systems up. You don't have the basics in place. Same with investing. Good news is you have 40k in your 401k, which is great. But you haven't been doing anything else. No Roth ira, no anything else. And those are things that you could set up, frankly, in about a week. Okay, so you want to take this seriously. Great. Don't worry about what happened. And you missed that stuff in the past. That is in the past. All, all you can do now is say, look, this is the direction I want to go. I'm going to educate myself and get started right now and I'm going to set those basic processes in place and I'm going to focus on my earnings. You do that and five years are going to pass one way or another. And at the end of two, three, four, five years, you're going to be very pleasantly surprised by how far you have come.

How should we think about rejection or failure when negotiating?

Negotiating. It's all a dance. It's all a dance. When you negotiate, you should remember that 80% of the work is done before you ever set foot in the room. So for example, with a salary negotiation, the work is done by making sure you understand the company that you're currently working at by speaking to your boss, by asking what it takes to be a top performer. And you can see me talk about this. You can Google Ramit Sethi negotiation. You can also go to iwt.comproducts and get the no stress negotiation course, which shows you the exact words and even body language to use when you go into a negotiation. What if they say that's just our standard rate? How do you respond? So the first thing to know is 80% of the work is done before you get in the room. How do you position yourself? What questions do you ask? All that matters way more than what happens in the room. But once you get in the room, you want to, you want to conduct yourself like a professional. Too often you see people walking in saying, I want more. Why? Get out of my office? That's exactly what happened to me when I was young. I was a consultant. I walked into my boss's office, I was like, I'd like to know, negotiate a raise. He's like, why? I was like, I didn't expect that. I was like, because I've been here a while. He's like, get out of my office. I was like, okay. I just walked out. I never did that again. Because he was right. He kicked my ass out. I had no reason. I just walked in like, hey, can I have some money? No, get out. So you need to have a reason and you need to actually be good. No boss just going to hand you money for free or for no reason. But you also need to ask now. The question was about failure. What if you get rejected? Okay, Spend a day, eat some ice cream. You feel horrible about yourself, fine. But I'm more focused on what do you do on day two. How do you recenter and learn from this experience? It's not a failure. It's just a test. You tested something, it didn't work. Let's learn from it. So I would do a really candid assistance assessment. What were all the steps of that negotiation? If I just walked in and said, hey, I'd like to ask for a raise, and my boss was not having it. What did I do wrong? Did I not lay the groundwork? Did I not say it right? Was I not prepared for that question? How could I have prepared? And if you're not even sure what questions to ask, then get no stress negotiations. So you know what questions to ask most. Most of the time in a negotiation, it's your strategy that's wrong, not just your tactics so you can have the smoothest lines. But if you didn't set the groundwork before you walk in the room, you're sunk. It doesn't matter how smooth you are. So back to the failure. You feel bad for a day. You analyze what went wrong, and then you say, what can I do going forward? Remember, you're not entirely entitled to a raise. You're not entitled to win at any negotiation. And this is a critical thing a lot of people get hung up on. They're like, well, I did this and I asked the right thing, and I had the right body language, and I still didn't get it. It's like, yeah, you don't always get it. The best people in a company get the lion's share of the raises, and everybody else gets scraps or nothing at all. That's the way the world works. Okay, so what is it? So the question is not, oh, why is it so unfair. The question is, what does it take to be the best? What can I do? And so you got to refocus on asking that question, making sure that you are aligned with your boss, and then going at it again. And finally, if you still keep getting rejected, then you need to ask yourself, is this a company where I'm actually going to be able to make more, or do I need to move somewhere else where my skills are better taken advantage of? All right, with that, I want to wrap up with a couple of things. First off, I want to thank everyone for coming to these videos. This has been awesome. Tonight, I have an announcement to make, which is this will be the final Fireside Chat in this format. I have loved it. I've loved coming here since the first. I think it was the first or second day that we got here. We started this thing. I said, I'm going to be here. And every night we came, we did everything. Friday, talking about personal finance, how to save money during coronavirus. We talked about what to do if you are a high earner. We talked about the most important thing on earth, how to iron, you filthy wrinkle wearing cretins. I showed you A crazy way to iron. I still remember that night, Cass, you had a little bit too much wine. And I was like, pay attention to me. I'm like, this is my show. This is the show of my life. We did that. We even did story time where I simply told some stories about my life.

Yeah, go to YouTube.

That was the best one.

That was the best one.

Those two are probably my favorites.

Everyone's really sad in the chat room right now.

Oh, they are. Okay.

Yeah.

Well, I, I, I want to say a couple things. First of all, it has been a joy to come here and actually something that we looked forward to. And every night we're like, all right, let's get the camera set up. We're going to do this. And we laugh about the comments that come in. And, you know, once in a while we get someone who's again trying to stalk and, you know, ask about my favorite fragrance, you creeps, and where we are, where are you and where are you? And what fragrance do you wear? But anyway, but I want to say I have loved it, and I hope that this has been something where every night you could come and feel a little bit of positivity with what's going on. As I've always said, you can't control what's going on outside, but we can control what's going on inside. Now, what am I going to be doing instead? I'm going to tell you. With each thing that I do at iwt, we're always experimenting and trying, and I have loved this. But I also think that there are other opportunities for me to give you the material that will be really useful to you. So you may have seen some of these Instagram videos that I've been posting out there. You may have seen some of this YouTube stuff that I'm doing. Some of you have even started asking me about some of this other stuff that I do behind the scenes. Like, for example, would it be helpful for you to see me actually coaching somebody one on one? I think that would be awesome. But that's hard to do in a format like this, so please stay tuned. I have a whole bunch of new stuff coming out. I'm not disappointed. I'm not going anywhere. In fact, when did I start this thing? 2004 is when the blog started. That's 16 years. I'm not going anywhere. I love this. This is my rich life. All right? But I'm always experimenting with the format so that I can offer something amazing. So stay tuned, tell your friends, and I will.