All You Have to do is Ask!

"The answer is always no if you don't ask" -- quote from Dave Ramsey from his Podcast

I think I've stumbled onto something with this whole asking thing. In past couple of weeks asking has put over $1400 either into my bank account or will be saved over the next six months. I previously wrote about How one call saved us $180. In this post I want to tell you about two other times I asked and the outcome.

The community where we live has a clubhouse that residents can use. Part of the club house is a fitness center and inside the fitness center is a weight machine. Previoulsy I had found out that an instructional DVD was available for the weight machine and I managed to get a copy of it. I somehow lost it and wanted to start using it again. (I'm a little slow on the whole get into shape new years resolution thing). I was going through my old emails and saw where I had contacted the manufacturer of the weight machine asking about the DVD. They had previoulsy offered to sell me one for $35 but I didn't want to pay that. I forwarded the old email and asked the guy if they happened to have any DVD's that were extra or that perhaps had a bad label or something that I could buy at at discount. The guy emailed back and asked for my shipping address. I supplied it and he sent me a brand new DVD free of charge. Cha Ching - just saved $35.00 + shipping.

Late last week I saw a post on Craigslist for a guy renting camera equipment here in our area. I emailed him asking if he was interesting in adding a camera to his rental inventory because I had one I wanted to sell. He said he wasn't but forwarded me an ad for a guy in a near by town that was looking for the exact camera I wanted to sell. I contacted the guy looking for the camera. We met. He bought the camera for my asking price plus an extra $100 worth of other camera goodies I had that were specific to that camera. Cha Ching - $1200.00. I gotta tell you it felt good holding 24 $50 bills in my hand. I got to hold them until we got to the bank and deposited them. When we got home I scheduled an extra payment on the bill we are concentrating on paying off as part of our debt snowball.

Three times I've asked and three times I have benefitted from asking. I'm telling you - if you're not asking then odds are you're costing yourself.