Tips on Living in Poverty # 5 Haggling and showering

Haggle. On everything, everywhere. Okay, maybe this tip won't work at box-stores and corporate chains, but you can haggle anywhere that's locally owned and with a moderate chance of successfully lowering the price of your goods or services. Haggling is not like bidding on Ebay (although you can often find stuff cheaper there than at retail prices); haggling is an art. I haven't mastered it yet, only dabbled, but the place I started haggling most successfully is with my medical bills. Yes. I said that. Doesn't matter if you have insurance or not, or how large or small the bill is. If you flash cash money around, more often than not, your medical provider will take however much it is and zero your balance.

Here's why: every doctor's offices and hospital sends out 1,000,000 bills every year. About 320 of them get paid. Insurance companies do their thing, and then saddle you with the remainder of the invoice. But what they're not telling you is that they'll take as little as 25% of the invoice if you can fork over the cold, hard cash (or check. Possibly Krugerrands) up front. Have a $5,000 hospital bill? Offer $2,300 cash (no tips on how to legally obtain the $2,300, sorry). It's in the hospital's interest to snatch it up immediately, rather than set up a payment plan with you for $10 or $25 a month for the next twenty five hundred years. "YES WE'LL TAKE YOUR MONEY NOW rather than gamble that you'll ever be able to pay-in-full on that piss poor payment plan." Medical care is expensive shit, and yeah they're going to bill you for all they can, and rightly so - they got bills to pay too. But how many times have you just unthinkingly returned that little detachable slip with your credit card number written in the boxes for the five payments of $190? Once is too many.

Medical debt may affect your credit, but since it can never go into collections, medical providers can be screwed if you just never pay. (You should pay. Always pay something.)  So they're actually pretty stoked when you offer cash. My first was with a piddly bill; some of my outrageously enjoyable gynecological procedures this year weren't covered by my insurance. I got a bill for $160. I took them a $100 bill and said "can we call it even?" They never blinked an eye. Shit, I should have offered $60.

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Showering: change it up. Cold showers apparently save energy and make you prettier than hot showers. I guess saving energy is saving money. Also, you could try my method of going a couple days in between showering or hair-washing. Lately I'm wondering how time/energy/money saving that is, though. When I find myself tasked with cleaning my body after five days that spanned activities such as exercising, getting baby pee/vomit/poo/snot on me, volunteering at this awesome horse ranch,* and cooking,  I spend a hell of a lot more time scrubbing to make sure I'm squeaky clean, as opposed to when I shower everyday: then it's more of a half-assed soapy rinse. I guess before I promote this tip, I should experiment and compare the combined times of my showers across two weeks: one week of showering everyday, versus another week of showering twice, and see which method actually saves time. But that sounds like a hell of a lot of effort.
* beware super cheesy promo youtube link

The dubious validity of the showering conversation as viable tip on living well in poverty tells me it's about time to end this series.

Comic courtesy of  Jen Heller Meservey