If you have been following the advice from any personal finance expert or bloggers over the last few years, you might know the trick of ringing up your service providers, threatening to leave and getting a discount for staying. It works, but if you are anything like me, having to make another phone call is something you keep putting off, sometimes for months and months. You can haggle with Sky online and I want to share my success story in haggling with Sky and getting a massive £450 off our bill – without picking up a phone.
First things first, I want to credit Fi from Savvy in Somerset for this ideas. Fi had discovered a super lazy way to haggle with Sky and get 10% off immediately without even talking to anyone! Inspired by this, I decided that I wanted to save my Dad some money on his Sky bill. We are always looking for ways to live a more frugal life as well as finding ways to stick to a budget.
Here's the thing: we don't have Sky TV, or any TV subscription apart from Netflix, Hayu and Amazon Prime. I love making money whilst watching Netflix.
We cancelled our £40 per month Sky package almost 5 years ago, with the promise to ourselves that we would get it back whenever we started to miss it. All these years later we haven't missed it.
However, for my retired Dad, Sky TV is a necessity. His TV package alone is well over £60 a month. Ouch!
For a pensioner that soon adds up! Sure, cancelling Sky TV is an easy way to save money, but trust me that would not wash with my Dad.
For very boring reasons, the Sky TV package at my Dad's house is in my name (the very boring reason is that when I moved back home after university, I got a better new customer deal than he was offered as a loyal customer, so we simply cancelled his package and took a new one out in my name) and his monthly payment comes out of my bank account.
Using Fi's method, I popped onto the Sky website and, like Fi's blog post mentioned, I was offered 10% off for 18 months immediately.
I wanted more though.
Sky invited me to pop onto live chat to continue to cancel my account, where I got chatting to Aisha.
Aisha wanted to know a lot about our viewing habits, probably to make sure we are actually using what we are paying for. After chatting for awhile she went off and came back with this saving:
A saving of £268.20 over 18 months. Just for going on live chat for a few minutes.
I wanted more though, and I continued chatting to Aisha, explaining that it was still too much money to be spending. It took over 10 minutes but then I had another fantastic offer:
This time I was being offered a saving of £408.60 over 18 months. Just by asking nicely.
You guessed it…I had to ask just one more time, promising that if Aisha got the monthly payments to under £40, we could have a deal.
Aisha went off again and did her magic, and she did it! She came back with an offer of £39.30 per month!
For anyone paying attention, over 18 months that is a whopping £471.60 off my Dad's Sky subscription, just from haggling online with Sky.
There is a small £10 admin fee to pay, bringing the total savings to £461.60.
My Dad is saving himself just over £25 a month on his subscription because I tried to haggle with Sky.
Other things to consider when haggling online with Sky
The first thing to mention is that we did have to enter into a new 18 month contract, which was fine for us.
The second thing to mention is that this whole process actually took an hour.
It wasn't a quick chat, with Aisha having to firstly figure out if we were making use of our package and then for her to go and look at deals for us. Once I'd agreed the offer we had to agree to some terms and conditions and go over a few boring bits.
I have to say though, it was one of the most profitable hours of my life!
If you have been putting off picking up the phone to haggle with Sky then I can highly recommend popping onto their live chat and talking through your options. I felt that I could have pushed maybe once more, but I was happy with this saving.
You might also like these 27 money saving hacks, how to save £500 this weekend and 50 ways to save money this week.
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11 responses
You really can do anything! Well done! Inspiring
Great post! I too was inspired by Fi’s article, but found that you need to get on the phone for the best savings. I got 75% off our bill. It’s staggering to think how much profit they must be making if they can still offer these huge discounts!
Next time ask “why is there now an admin fee?” (as this is a new thing they only introduced recently). I did and instead of answering the question, they just said “don’t worry, I’ll waive the admin fee for you”, so we didn’t have to pay it. Also, you should be able to get some free credit in your account, on top of the discount, if you ask nicely. I always do the annual haggle via live chat rather than phone too – takes longer, but feels easier. Currently paying just £4.80 per month (so less than £60 total for the whole YEAR!!) as managed to get a 75% off offer with £50 free credit (and no admin fee).
Wow, that’s amazing! Some great tips as well. Thank you so much!
🙂
I need to do this as our sky bill is currently £94 a month. ? we only have variety package , sky cinema , broadband and phone… however my stepmother who visits once a month wanted multiroom so she pays towards that but it is still a lot.
I’ll try and let you know how I got on.! ??
Honestly do it! You could save so much money!
Ive been trying with sky for days, no joy
Good luck, I hope you manage to get through!
Hi!
Just tried this and managed to save £19 p/m off my bill (over £350 over 18 months) ???
Bit of a lengthy process, think it took around 1hr 30mins but all worth it to be honest!
Thanks,
Tom
Fantastic result, well done!