Today I called my cable and internet provider to confirm when my current "promotions"—my promotions are really retentions plans I was offered when I tried to cancel—expire. After a few minutes and a handful of questions I saved another $15 per month, and ended up with better home internet service than I started with.

I've said this before, but you need to be calling your wireless carrier, cable provider, internet provider (often all three are the same company) at least once per year to make sure you're not getting totally hosed. My move is usually to threaten to cancel to get a better deal, but today I didn't even have to do that.

My current deals are mostly just straight discounts on top of the plan to which I'm currently subscribed. I simply confirmed that I'm still eligible for the same $25 per month off my internet service—I'm good until March 2016. Then I asked if that same discount would apply to a different plan. When the answer was yes, I switched to a new plan that was a better deal than my existing one without having to give up my discount. Perfect. I went from having a 1TB monthly limit to having an unlimited cap for less money. The download speeds didn't change, but I'm already on a crazy 250 Mbps plan anyway, so I'm good there.

The whole thing took less than 15 minutes, and I'm going to save about $180 per year. You should really give it a try.