Day-to-day purchases in this country are generally pretty straightforward: Instead of haggling we look at the price tag, decide if it’s worth it, and make our decision. That means we don’t build up a lot experience negotiating, so when it comes to discussing salaries with potential employers or calling up our credit-card companies to ask for lower-rates, we’re tongue-tied. Still, negotiating is an important skill. Here are some tips on how to do it right.

1. Research your options. The more information you come to the table with, the more confident you’ll be. Look into available competing offers so you know the going rate. You can find lists of low-rate credit cards on www.bankrate.com and www.billshrink.com; look for cards that offer free or low-rate balance transfers so you can have the option of taking your “business” – your debt – elsewhere. If you’re calling to ask for a break on a medical bill from a hospital, you can find out what Medicare pays for the same procedure at www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov (click on “find and compare hospitals”). For car shopping, check www.edmunds.com, and www.kbb.com to get a sense of current prices and financing offers before you walk onto the lot. And searching on craigslist.org can give you a good idea of the prevailing rents in your area.
2. Be polite but firm. Takeaway host Celeste Headlee was able to get her credit-card interest rate lowered just by calling and asking. And I got on the phone this week with a few Takeaway listeners and their credit-card companies to see if I could help negotiate lower interest rates for them, too. In some cases, we were denied. But with a listener named Michael, I was able to cut his interest rate in half just by repeatedly asking politely for a supervisor. When we got a “no,” we called back and repeated the process until we got a higher-up to agree to cut his interest rate. In the end, this will save him more than $800, and it wasn’t because I knew some insider trick: the only secret was persistence, politeness and firmness.
3. Don’t get carried away. You should have a bottom-line number in mind when you head into the negotiation: a number you won’t go below (or above, depending on the situation). And remember that the other party has their own bottom-line number, too. If you threaten to transfer your credit-card balance to another card, for example, your card company might very well call your bluff. So don’t make grand threats you’re not prepared to follow through on!
4. Be yourself. A lot of people are scared of negotiating because they think they have to take on a hard-as-nails persona to get the job done. But that’s wrong, and thinking that way can only make you feel more nervous. Negotiating doesn’t require a personality transplant, just common sense. Be yourself, be natural, have a sense of humor, and don’t announce you’re negotiating – just do it.
5. Just ask. The fact is, you won’t always get what you ask for. But you’ll never regret having tried. In another experiment, I called up 20 hotels around the country to ask about their rates for a particular weekend in May. After they quoted me a price, I simply asked them if there was any way to lower it. In 12 out of the 20 cases, it was. In a case like this, when you’re “negotiating” with a stranger, you have nothing to lose. (But don’t rely on negotiating alone: Websites like Hotwire.com and Kayak.com often had even better deals than the hotels themselves.)