Coming clean right off the bat: I can’t personally teach you how to haggle or negotiate anything. It terrifies me almost as much as falling in love or doing improv theater. But at least I’m not alone.

Amy Reiter over at Salon.com posted a great article yesterday called “How I learned to haggle”, and while I recommend the whole story, I’ll distill the bullet points for you here:

• Practice
• Act as if it’s a game
• Just say, ‘Is that the best you can do?’ And then be quiet [...] Silence is a great tactic.
• Negotiate for yourself as if you are negotiating for others

I can also vouch for the silence technique as being particularly effective in getting your co-workers to understand your point of view. I don’t mean offering anyone the “silent treatment,” just including some longer pauses during the course of a conversation that starts with people disagreeing. Now that I think about it, I guess it is a kind of negotiation.

Any other tips? Please leave them in the comments below.

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I was speaking with a co-worker who used to be a telemarketer, and she told me that if I’m ever again harassed by any strangers on the phone trying to sell me things I don’t need, I should just say, “Mark me down as deceased.” You don’t even have to pretend to be a different person.

Apparently, they have a check box on their form for “Deceased” that will prevent them from calling you ever again. What’s more, this misinformation gets passed downstream to the other telemarketers that they sell their lists of “customers” to, so those people won’t be calling you, either.

This is just a quick and dirty alternative to the more official process that Flexo has previously talked about.

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It was only back in April that Flexo wrote about MissingMoney.com. I had heard about it once before through a friend on Twitter who said he’d had some success and so I figured, “What have I got to lose?” They don’t charge anything, it’s just a convenient way to get at some abandoned money that should be yours in the first place.

I searched for myself in the three different states in which I’ve lived and found an entry tied to an old street address of mine for “More than $100″. I had to continue the process on a different site for that State, but since all they really needed was my name, it wasn’t that much of a hassle, and I never felt I was being scammed.

In my case the funds I was missing out on were submitted by Daimler Chrysler, which means it had something to do with the aftermath of totaling my car back in 2001. Ultimately, in order to claim the missing money, I needed to mail (or submit via a form on a Web page) some proof that I used to live at that address. Something like a utility bill or a bank statement. I don’t keep those sorts of things any longer than I have to, which to me means, “throw away as soon as you’re not using them anymore.”

However, crashing your car isn’t just an event, it’s a process that can go on, at a minimum, for weeks. A lot of paperwork is generated. I started keeping everything in a folder so I could prove the facts of the case at a moment’s notice. I figured seven years is a good amount of time to hang on to something that important, so in 2008, while pruning the filing cabinet, I very nearly got rid of the folder. Luckily, something stopped me, and a few months later, I was able to scan and e-mail the actual police report that described the accident, and included my address.

A couple of weeks later I got a check for $155. Naturally, I deposited it and made a $155 payment to one of my two remaining credit cards. If I’d received that money when I was supposed to in 2001… well, I can’t say exactly what I would’ve done with it, but some of it probably would’ve gone toward beer.

(Photo by C.P. Storm)

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