{"id":101,"date":"2012-01-18T08:41:11","date_gmt":"2012-01-18T16:41:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michael.westapher.com\/?p=101"},"modified":"2012-01-18T08:41:11","modified_gmt":"2012-01-18T16:41:11","slug":"new-study-only-1-in-10-people-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/michael.westapher.com\/?p=101","title":{"rendered":"New Study: Only 1 in 10 People Care"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I spent about an hour yesterday calling all of the companies that I write checks to monthly to see what I could do to lower my payments due to my unemployment. I began every call with the same sentence &#8212; &#8220;I&#8217;ve recently lost my job and am calling to see if I can lower the cost of this service before I have to start cutting back on my services.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Here are the results:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>AT&amp;T &#8211; (Cell phone) They wouldn&#8217;t charge me less for my current plan and it didn&#8217;t make sense to scale back my plan as it&#8217;s already pretty minimal.<\/li>\n<li>Clackamas Garbage Co. &#8211; They didn&#8217;t answer the phone and asked me to leave a voicemail. I opted not to at this time.<\/li>\n<li>Clackamas River Water &#8211; The representative I spoke with stated that they were unable to reduce rates.<\/li>\n<li>Comcast (internet) &#8211; Comcast didn&#8217;t offer to reduce my rate but they did suggest that I scale back my service to a lower speed, which I did. This saves me about $20\/mo.<\/li>\n<li>DirecTV &#8211; DirecTV knocked $10 off my bill for 12 months without having to scale back my service.<\/li>\n<li>Farmers Insurance &#8211; I was unable to reach my insurance agent (phone) because the local office was closed due to inclement weather. Snow was falling at the time. My email bounced back as well.<\/li>\n<li>Homestreet Bank (mortgage) &#8211; This is a real catch 22. I cannot adjust the interest rate on my mortgage due to type of loan that I have. I also cannot adjust loan until I&#8217;ve missed 3 consecutive payments. I cannot refinance the house without a job. I would also have to payout the amount in escrow to before I could modify the loan. I could make half payments but any shortage or missed payment would negatively impact my credit score.<\/li>\n<li>NW Natural &#8211; The gas company is unable to reduce my rates. They referred me to 3 Energy Assistance Programs.<\/li>\n<li>PGE &#8211; The power company were also unable to reduce my rates but I could let payments slip and pay it off in the future should things\u00a0get dire. I just needed to let them know that I was doing this intentionally.<\/li>\n<li>Water Environment Services &#8211; I might be able to cut sewage rate in half should I qualify. Some info on a program is being mailed to me that I&#8217;ll need to fill out and mail back in.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I guess I shouldn&#8217;t be all that surprised that I wasn&#8217;t able to lower my monthly costs by much. The real thing that surprised me was that only one person stated that they were sorry that I had lost my job. I spent some time working in a call center and while I&#8217;m certainly aware that you can become numb to the grinding nature of the job, it&#8217;s not difficult to say something brief and supportive. The lady at DirecTV was the only one to state that she was sorry I had lost my job and at the end of the call, she circled back around and wished me good luck in my job search.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I spent about an hour yesterday calling all of the companies that I write checks to monthly to see what I could do to lower my payments due to my unemployment. I began every call with the same sentence &#8212; &#8220;I&#8217;ve recently lost my job and am calling to see if I can lower the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/michael.westapher.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/michael.westapher.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/michael.westapher.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michael.westapher.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michael.westapher.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=101"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/michael.westapher.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104,"href":"http:\/\/michael.westapher.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions\/104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/michael.westapher.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michael.westapher.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michael.westapher.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}