My advice: If you’re hesitant to do it, force yourself to give it one try, no matter how uncomfortable it feels. If you don’t like it, never do it again. Chances are you’ll do it, like it, and be eager to try it again.

When we were rehabbing our house we came upon a clearance range at Sears. It was already marked down due to a dent on one side, a saleman noticed us inspecting it, and came over and asked us if we were interested. I said, “I would be if it was $100 less.”
The guy instantly marked it down a $100.

Then we said, “O.K. then.”

Normally, I do all the service to my car. This past weekend I dropped the car off for some work because I prefered to spend Father’s Day with my family instead of under the car in the garage. Obviously, I wanted to pay as little as possible. When the shop called for authorization to perform the repairs, I asked for a breakdown of the work, including parts and labor. Everything sounded OK except the price of the front-end alignment. I thought their price was too high based on the amount of work involved. In this case, I ended up with 10% off the entire bill.

Ha! Clearly, Flexo, you with your evil negotiating ways, have singlehandedly driven an otherwise completely-solvent and debt-free company out of business! ;)

I always favor the “What’s the lowest price you can offer?” tactic. Agreed with the lack of yes/no questions. This works great at hotels, rental car companies, etc. They almost always throw in a discount.

I’m still kicking myself for not negotiating SOMETHING with the landlord on our new place. The problem is it’s a unique place in a small town without a lot of rental stock, and it had everything we wanted! Still…I could have done something, says my haggler side. :s

-Erica

Sonny asked a good question – where do you start as an offer. Well it helps to do research and see if you can find out what the seller paid for the item. It also helps if you can talk to someone in the industry about what market price is. For instance when we bought our house last year a realtor friend told us the average markdown on homes was 17%. You don’t want to insult the person, but you want to get as much off as possible. I was buying a really nice home in a great location and knew I wouldn’t get 17% off, but we ended up getting about 12% off asking price.

Sometimes just a conversation with the salesperson can give you a clue. My dad and I were out this weekend looking at leather chairs. He found one he wanted but was going to offer about 30% less. But the more we talked to the salesman we realized this is a popular chair that sells well and can only be custom ordered. Now we feel like if we get 5% off it might be good. He’s going to try the “If I pay cash…” line and see if he can get the 5%.

But as a general rule of thumb, do your research and offer somewhere between 5% to 20% off. If you feel like you can get more once you do the research than by all means try to get 30-40 or even 50% off.