Hi everyone I'm Rose Marie Miller here with Matt Schultz a personal finance expert and the author of Ask

Questions Save Money Make More here to tell us about negotiating financial success.

Thank you so much for joining me today Matt.

Thanks for having me I appreciate it.

Absolutely so Matt how can individuals effectively negotiate bills and expenses to optimize their financial situation?

Well, the good news is that there are so many ways that you can do it and so many opportunities

because one of the things that I try and put out there as much as I can when I'm doing interviews in my day job at Lending Tree is that you

have more power over your money than you realize if you are willing to wield it. And that comes

whether you're talking about a gym membership, a mortgage, a credit card, a job interview, or if you're talking

about trying to split the cost of a group dinner.

You have so many opportunities to negotiate

and to find ways to pay less, earn a little bit more, keep more of your hard-earned money by asking

the right questions and kind of taking the right approach when it comes to negotiating.

So what are those right questions?

Well it really depends on what you are looking at and what you're trying to accomplish.

One of the inspirations for this book was the fact that I've done a bunch of

interviews over my over my time as a personal finance expert talking about how

76% of people who ask for a lower interest

rate on one of their credit cards get one.

And the average reduction can be anywhere from six to seven percentage points.

That's a really big deal and whenever I tell that to people I get a lot of response of wow, that was something that you could do.

But the truth is that it is, and but it's something that you generally have to ask for and they're not going to necessarily

...