As part of my effort to save our family money by hiring myself to find savings, I set out to cancel AOL. We have a cable high speed conncection and were paying AOL $9.95/month for a bring your own access plan.
I have had AOL since I first went online back in 1996 or 1997. It’s all my kids and I have ever really known as far as online access. Still, I couldn’t justify the extra $10/month so after I got our new screenames and address book and favorite places transfered over to our cable account, I dialed the 800 number to cancel AOL.
I knew I’d have to talk to a real, live person because they never make it easy for you to cancel something. Sure enough I got the guy who gave me the song and dance about all the AOL features that I couldn’t find anywhere else. He also started cutting my rate and I stayed strong until he got to $4.95/month.
I started thinking about how my daughter loves AOL and how I could keep it around in case a stray email that I needed came through (I’ve had the same screename for 9 years!. So, feeling proud that I at least cut the amount in half I agreed to hang around. We’ll give it a month or two and maybe I’ll decide to cancel it all together. This time I’ll use the “fax in your cancellation request” option.
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