Financial Challenge - Day 16
In the last few Financial Challenges, we’ve hit on area such as cable TV, Internet service and long distance phone service where you may be able to find painless savings. Today we are going to take a look at a less obvious monthly charge where you may be able to compare prices and get a better deal - your garbage service.
It used to be that you had to pay the garbage rate dictated by your city and that was that. What usually happened was that the city would contract with a single garbage company and that was the price that everyone paid. More and more cities, however, are fostering competition among several private garbage collection companies these days. It is no longer unusual to find a city’s garbage services have been contracted out to a number of different garbage companies to help keep prices more competitive. That’s correct - you may have a choice on what company comes to pick up your garbage and the service can vary as much as $10 a month (that’s $120 a year toward your debt reduction or into your simple savings plan).
In the time that you have set aside for today’s Financial Challenge, you are going to call your city hall or local city offices to find out if there is more than one garbage disposal company licensed and qualified to dispose of your garbage. If there is more than one, you want to get a list of all the companies along with their phone numbers. Once you have these, call each company to check their pricing including the charges for special services (recycling, large item disposal, garden waste, etc). You may be surprised to find out that you can get your same garbage service for less.
We were going to switch, it would have saved us almost 5 a month, but we started taking it ourselves (there is a recycling center very nearby)