The Personal Finance Podcast - How to Negotiate Your Rent Like A Pro (and win the negotiation!)

Episode Date: August 3, 2022

In this episode of the personal finance podcast, we're gonna talk about how you can negotiate your rent, like a pro.  Checklist of what we talk about: . Step by step guide on how to negotiate your... rent. How to keep your housing expenses below 30% of your net income How to build wealth Checklist of relevant episodes:  How to Choose The Right Budget for You (Why budgets Create Freedom!) The 4 Life Changing Options to Building Wealth (Level Up Your Money!) How to Negotiate Your Bills (and Save over Six-Figures!)   FREE GUIDES: ============== -Check out the free guide on where to put your money in what order!  https://www.mastermoney.co/stairway-to-wealth   -Here is the free How to Ask for A Raise ebook! https://www.mastermoney.co/get-a-raise-ebook   -Get Access to the 75-Day Challenge: https://www.mastermoney.co/75daychallenge    =============   We have a YOUTUBE channel! Check it out here!    Our Latest Videos:  How To Grow A Podcast Organically What Would Happen If You Maxed Out Your Roth IRA By Age?! (These Results Will Amaze You!) How to Become a Millionaire With a Small Amount of Money (Is it Really This Easy!?) Pre-tax moves for high earners   ============   Got questions? Ask me on Instagram Here. @mastermoneyco This is the fastest way to get in touch with me.    ============ Sponsors:    Thanks to Policygenius For Sponsoring the show! Check them out a Policygenius.com Thanks to Mint Mobile for supporting the show! Cut your phone bill to $15 a month by going to https://mintmobile.com/pfp Thanks to Fundrise for Sponsoring the show! Invest in real estate for as little as $10 by going to fundrise.com/personalfinance Thank you to Hello Fresh for sponsoring the show! Go to Hello Fresh and use code PFP16 for 16 free meals and 3 free gifts. Thanks to Gusto for Sponsoring the Show! Check them out at Gusto.com/pfp. Thank you to Chime for sponsoring the show! Check them out at chime.com/pfp     ============   Want to Support the Show? Follow on Spotify or Follow and Leave a 5-Star Review on Apple Podcasts! ============   More Episodes You Will Love:    The Stairway to Wealth 2.0 (The Order You Should Put Your Money in!) How to Track Your Net Worth How to Set Money Goals You Will Actually Achieve How To Prevent Lifestyle Creep (Lifestyle Inflation) 7 Ways to Pay Down Your Student Loans Faster How You Can Have a Free Car for Life (It's True!) Why Your Savings Rate Matters    ============   Check out all the Stuff I Recommend!    USEFUL RESOURCES: Best Place to Open a Roth IRA: https://m1finance.8bxp97.net/5vzD1 My Favorite Free Net Worth and Budget Tool: https://fxo.co/905L Best High Yield Savings Account: https://bit.ly/3HpPjAr  Get a $10 Free Bonus with Acorns: https://bit.ly/3lV0LLE Best Bank and Debit Card for Kids: https://bit.ly/3pJeI09  Get $5 Free Bitcoin at Coinbase: https://bit.ly/3oIQOml Best Credit Building Tool: https://bit.ly/3rmBuwZ  Best Personal Finance Books: https://kit.co/MasterMoney/best-personal-finance-books    ============     DISCLAIMER: I am not a financial adviser. This Podcast is for educational purposes only. Investing of any kind involves risk. While it is possible to minimize risk, your investments are solely your responsibility. It is imperative that you conduct your own research. I am sharing my opinion.    AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE: Some of the links on this channel are affiliate links, meaning, at NO additional cost to you, I may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase and/or subscribe. However, this does not impact my opinion.   ============     Check us out on social fam!    Twitter   www.thepersonalfinancepodcast.com   www.mastermoney.co Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:01:00 On this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, we're going to talk about how you can negotiate your rent like a pro. What's up, everybody, and welcome to the Personal Finance Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew, founder of Master Money.com. And today on the Personal Finance Podcast, we're going to be talking about how to negotiate your rent like a pro. If you have any questions, hit me up on TikTok or Instagram at Mastermind. or Money Co. And follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whatever podcast player you love listening to this podcast to him.
Starting point is 00:01:52 If you want to help out the show and thank you so much to every single person who has been leaving five star ratings and reviews, it truly helps out the show. And if you think someone could benefit from learning how to build wealth, share this podcast with him because this is something where our entire goal is to teach as many people as possible how to build wealth. So today we are going to be talking about how to negotiate your rent like a pro. And if you didn't hear our last episode, we talked about what you should do if your rent starts to rise, specifically if it's rising dramatically.
Starting point is 00:02:29 And obviously housing is one of the biggest costs that are out there that everybody has to deal with. And the biggest thing that you can do is if your living expenses are rising, you need to learn how to negotiate your rent. And negotiation skills are that. They are a skill that you can learn over time. And I'm going to teach you exactly how to do it for your rent specific purposes in this episode so that you can understand, hey, if my landlord is going to raise my rent 20, 30, 40 percent, I need to understand how to negotiate this where it's a win-win situation for both of us
Starting point is 00:03:01 and the price doesn't rise so high. And listen, I know how tough this environment is because the landlord typically has the upper hand in this environment. It can feel like everything is completely hopeless when it comes to your rent. but I want to help you navigate this market as much as you possibly can. Now, we always talk about this. We talk about this in the last episode as well. You want to keep your housing expenses below 30% of your net income that you take in every single month.
Starting point is 00:03:27 And this becomes harder and harder as time goes on because according to Fannie Mae Home Purchase Index, 69% of renters said that their rent increased or is expected to increase this year. And the national median rent for a two-bedroom unit as a, February was $1,985, which is a 20.4% jump over the previous year. So here's the problem into play. If your income is not rising, inflation is eating into your buy power. In addition, if you're renting and your rent goes up 20% over that time frame, that means you are down 30% from where you were last year in terms of your buying power with your housing. This is a very
Starting point is 00:04:10 difficult situation to be in. So you're going to have to learn how to navigate this a little bit. Now I understand this is tough. And listen, if you're in a financial bind, this is a situation where you have to spend a little more than 30% just to get by. Sometimes our savings rates are seasonal. Where we always talk about you, you need to have a savings rate of at least 20%. But that's also a seasonal thing.
Starting point is 00:04:31 If you're in a situation for a year where you can't save that total 20%, you can only squeeze out 15, 14, 10% somewhere in that range. And if it's only for a short period of time, that is okay, because this is a seasonal thing. But if you can reduce some costs, understanding how powerful it is to build wealth, understanding how powerful it is to invest your dollars, then you need to make sure that you're doing that over that time frame. So we're going to talk about a bunch of things today, but we're going to talk about why it's important to learn how to negotiate your biggest expense.
Starting point is 00:05:00 And then we're going to give you some tools to help you negotiate. And then I'm going to give you some talking points to use to your advantage as leverage within the negotiation. and then we're going to talk about what to do if you get really anxious and you're stressed out about negotiating. If that just brings you extreme anxiety to have to negotiate something with a lot of people, it does. And we're going to talk about how you can fix that and how you can work on it and practice it so that it's not so scary. And now one thing I want to note before we dive into this episode is that your negotiation with your landlord or the property manager of your property needs to be kind.
Starting point is 00:05:37 and it needs to be something where you are firm but extremely respectful. I mean, this needs to be a very respectful thing. Otherwise, you will lose the negotiation if you're not respectful. I can understand that sometimes these things can get heated. And even if they say something to you that may not be the right thing for them to say, you still need to remain calm and respectful throughout the entire negotiation. Because all negotiations are lost if you lose your temper. And all negotiations are lost if you get emotional.
Starting point is 00:06:05 So you must control your emotions within negotiation. That is the number one greatest thing that I want you to take away as you go about doing these negotiations. Now you can be firm and still be kind to people. And understanding that will really help you throughout this process. So let's jump into how to negotiate your rent. All right. So I'm going to give you the step-by-step guide on how to negotiate your rent. So step one is you have to do your research and prepare.
Starting point is 00:06:35 pair to negotiate. So the first thing that you want to do is you want to find out what properties are renting for in your area. Now, there's a number of ways that you can do this, but here's kind of the way that I would do it starting off. So the first way I would do it, specifically if you don't have a realtor friend or something along those lines, then you would go to zillow orrelator.com and you would search your address and look for rentals within a mile from your property. The reason why you want to find them as close as possible to your property is that's the most reasonable comps. Now, if you're in a remote area and there is literally nothing within a mile of your property,
Starting point is 00:07:12 get them as close as you possibly can. But if you are in an area that has somewhat of a population, you should be able to find comparable rentals within a mile from the property that you're currently renting. Now, here's the key to this. And a lot of people won't tell you this. But do not look for rentals that are being advertised. You want to look for rentals that have already been rentals. rented because rentals that are advertised could be getting negotiated down where they're trying to put a high price on the market, but it actually gets rented for less. So you want to find properties that are actually rented. And the way you can do that is when you're in Zillow or Realtor.com or Rent.com or Apartments.com or whatever you use, you can actually check a box that says looking for rentals that are actually rented, not rentals that are currently on the market. This will be the actual data that helps you. Now, don't worry about any of the rent or estimate numbers. The actual
Starting point is 00:08:02 properties that I've actually rented are the things that you truly care about. Now, what you want to do is gather this information for the last six months. You can gather data from even further out, but the thing about that is the market is changing so quickly, as you see, 20% change nationally just in the last year that you want to make sure that this data is as current as it possibly can be. And then make sure these are comparable properties. So a big thing with this is sometimes people try to pull comparable properties of like a five bedroom house in comparison to your one bedroom apartment. What you want to do is make sure that if you
Starting point is 00:08:34 have a one bedroom, one bathroom apartment, you're comparing that to one bedroom and one bathroom apartments. Don't take a three bedroom, two bathroom house. Don't take a two bedroom, two bathroom house. You want to make sure that these properties are actual comparables. Otherwise, when you use this information and negotiation, it's going to work against you. You have to understand that it needs to be a very close comp to what your current property is. Now you want to look at bedrooms, you want to look at bathrooms, and you want to look at square footage and try to match that up as closely as possible. Does the square footage need to be exact? Absolutely not, because every house is a little bit different. But if you have a three bedroom, two bathroom house, that's 1,248 square feet,
Starting point is 00:09:16 you want to make sure you at least find a three bedroom, two bathroom house that's somewhere in that range. If it's 1,100 square feet, if it's 1,300 square feet, that's fine. But it needs to be the three bedroom, two bathroom house with the same comparables. If one has a pool and yours doesn't have a pool, then there's something else that you can actually consider talking about. If it has better amenities than yours does, and that's going to help you as well, especially if it's at a cheaper price. Then you want to get the average rent of all the comparable properties. So you can do this in Excel. You can do this on a lot of these websites. They'll do it for you if you just check the box of a bunch of different properties. So you can get the average rent
Starting point is 00:09:53 of all those properties as well. And you can use this number as your negotiator. tool. Now, in addition to getting the price of rent, there's a couple of other things that I want you to research that's going to help you depending on how the negotiation goes, because negotiations can go all different directions. You want to try to control the negotiation as much as possible on your end. That's not always easy when you're in the middle of a negotiation. So the first thing to think about is what could the cost be to your landlord if you leave? So here are some things to know. Usually, when you're renting out a property and a tenant leaves, your property is vacant for about a month because what you have to do is you have to turn over that property,
Starting point is 00:10:31 meaning you have to paint the walls, you have to clean out the property, you have to make sure anything that's broken is fixed before you rent out the property or put it on the market. So there's a bunch of costs at play there. What that means is they are losing, if it's just one month, they are losing 8% rent for that entire year. That's a significant sum of money. So say, for example, you're in a negotiation and they raise the rent $100. So it's $1,200 a year to do that.
Starting point is 00:10:56 But if you leave, they're going to lose, say, if your rent's $2,000 a month, that's an $800 difference right there that they would lose. So the rent increase is not enough for it to be equal to the amount if you leave and they have to do that turnover. So that's something where you just want to think through some of these numbers and think through some tactics as to what you can say and what you can utilize if this negotiation does not go well and it does not go in your favor towards the end. You can pull out some things like this and utilize those.
Starting point is 00:11:25 obviously, again, I'm going to say this over and over in this podcast in a very respectful manner, but let your landlord know you are completely informed about this situation. So that's the first one. Vacancy costs are very high for a landlord. In addition, the cost to bring the unit up to the par. So how much is it cost to clean the unit? How much is it cost to paint? The minor repairs.
Starting point is 00:11:44 All those different things. It's a very costly thing to turn over a unit. Now, this is why, like early on, when I started investing, I love single family houses because people stay in single family houses when they rent them out. They stay there for years and years and years. Families go into single family houses and they stay up to five, six, seven. I've had tenants there for five years before. So this is where you want to make sure as a landlord that you find properties where people
Starting point is 00:12:09 want to stay. And part of that is making sure they're clean and tidy and in a good area and all that type of thing. In addition, you just want to make sure that your tenant stays because it's so costly to turn it over. Now, if they're trying to raise the rent on you 40, 50%, this is a different. type of situation, but you want to have this information in your back pocket so you can utilize it in a negotiation. In addition, if you have to turn over the property, you also have to take a
Starting point is 00:12:33 significant amount of time to turn over the property where you have to figure out, okay, who's my cleaning crew going in, who's the handy person who's going to fix all of the things that are broken, who's going to paint my walls, how am I going to be able to schedule them? All this time has to be taken out and focused on that property to turn it over. Now, if you are renting, this is one thing I really want you to note here. If you're renting from like a Black Rock, a massive real estate investment trust or something along those lines or a hedge fund, for example, I've dealt with hedge funds. I've actually bought properties from hedge funds before. When you're dealing with hedge funds, they are ruthless, they are cutthroat and they typically are significantly harder to negotiate with.
Starting point is 00:13:11 So if you're in like a really, really large apartment complex, you've got to think through who you're negotiating with because you want to be negotiating with the decision maker. The decision maker is going to make a massive difference. Whereas you're negotiating with a mom and pop landlord, all of a sudden, you are in a great situation to negotiate when you're doing that. So you want to get as close as possible to the decision maker when you start your negotiation process. So if you have a longer time horizon, you can kind of figure out who that is if you're working
Starting point is 00:13:38 with the REIT. But typically, if REITs are raising rents, they're going to follow all the rules, and they're going to figure out a way to do this and they don't really care if you stay or go. That's the downside to doing this if you're in a massive apartment. complex. So that may be a situation where you're going into this negotiation. You're giving it, you're all, you're going to do everything you can. But knowing in the back of your head, if you have to, you might have to walk. If you're not talking to the actual decision maker, because if you're not talking to a decision maker, it's very difficult to have a negotiation that gets anywhere. Now,
Starting point is 00:14:06 let's jump to step two. Step two is you have to know exactly what you want as you enter into this negotiation. You got to know the exact number, the amount of rent that you want to negotiate with. So if you walk into a rental negotiation without a number, you're at the mercy of the landlord. You have to know what you want. It's your landlord's job to determine how much money they want to charge you every month to maximize their profits. So that's what you're working against here.
Starting point is 00:14:32 So you need to know exactly what number that you want so that you can try to meet in the middle at that point. Now, this number is going to vary from person to person. Usually it really depends on where you live. If you live in Lexington, Kentucky, this number is going to be way lower than if you live in New York City. So understanding what the number needs to be is why we have step one. We want to make sure that you know exactly what that number is so that you can use this in the negotiation.
Starting point is 00:14:56 Sure, we all want cheaper rent, but there's also other things that you can add into this negotiation if you can't get the exact rent price you want. Let me give you some examples on some things that you can utilize to negotiate because if you're close enough, if you can get close enough to the price that you want, maybe you can throw in free parking or a free storage unit or garage. or maybe you can get free or partially paid utilities. That's a great negotiation tool because your monthly cost in housing, if you can reduce your utility cost but pay maybe a little bit more in rent, then you can even this whole thing out and get as close as possible to 30% or less of your net income. Or maybe you can get a guest parking pass or you can get your security deposit back or a security deposit waived. Or you can waive the pet fee for that year.
Starting point is 00:15:43 If you have pets, there's a number of different things that you can kind of to talk through and see if you can get some additional things as you negotiate your rent. That's the power of negotiating your rent. Sometimes you can add in bonuses. So even if your rent increases, you don't just have to take it on exactly what you're getting now. You can add in some bonuses as well. If there's some other things that you can think of, maybe there's additional amenities that you have to pay extra for. Well, you can add those into this negotiation as you go through this process. Now, step three, and this is a major one. After you've looked up and done your research, then you figured out exactly what you want to get out of this negotiation. You can write
Starting point is 00:16:17 this down to if you want like a document to kind of figure out, hey, where do I need to be? You can write down a sheet of paper. Then step three comes into play. And we're going to talk about step three right after this. I remember when I needed to hire someone fast, but finding the right person quickly felt impossible. And if you've ever been there, you know how stressful this can be. That's where Indeed comes in. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Instead of struggling to get your job post noticed, Indeed's sponsor jobs help you stand out and hire faster. Your post jumps up to the top of the page, making sure it reaches the right candidates. And it makes a huge difference.
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Starting point is 00:19:52 can. So look to begin negotiating two, three months in advance. And if you can do it even sooner, I would. But think of this from the lens of your landlord. As they're starting to approach the time frame, three, four, five months before you have to renew your lease, they're going to want to do what they can to get you to resign on their terms. That's why it's the best time to negotiate your rent. Now, there have been studies that have been done that the wintertime is actually a better time to negotiate your rent than are at peak times throughout the year. So you can think about it this way. There's a bunch of holidays throughout the winter. So a lot of people don't like moving in the winter, A, and if you live in a snowy climate, people don't like moving throughout that
Starting point is 00:20:33 climate as well, but studies have been done that you can actually get five, six, seven percent less on your rent if you're negotiating in the wintertime. And a recent study from rent hop, which is a popular apartment listing site, discover that you can save hundreds of dollars per year when you negotiate, specifically when you negotiate in the wintertime. And they say the best months are to negotiate between December and March and the worst months to negotiate are between May and October. So if you want to squeeze out a few extra hundred dollars out of this negotiation process and your lease is coming up towards maybe the end of the year or early in the next year. This is a great time to negotiate and it's a great time to actually have this
Starting point is 00:21:12 conversation so that you can make sure that you both lock in a win-win situation and lock it in on your terms. Now step four. Step four is something that you should be doing with any negotiation that you have, but you want to bring something to the table. What that means is a negotiation should feel like a win-win for both parties. Now, the key word I'm saying there is feel. You make the other party feel like they're winning as well. Now, you may be winning more. If you're saving thousands of dollars while they are just keeping you for a longer time frame, and that may be something where you feel like you're winning more, but it's still a win-win situation. So you need to incentivize your landlord to want to keep the rent lower. So how do you do that? You do that with what we call a deal
Starting point is 00:21:59 sweetener. So you know how in movies when someone tries to persuade someone to do something and they slide a dollar bill across the table and say something like, can George Washington change your mind? Now, you can do that too, but with a big stack of cash. Now, let me explain. Here are some bargaining chips that you can use. If you pay your rent on time every single month, if you've always paid your rent on time, make sure that you're stating that and make sure you're saying it throughout the process because sometimes landlords need to be reminded who their good tenants are. So that's the first chip to use. The second one, offer to sign a longer lease. So this is the best one to utilize where you don't have to put yourself into a financial burden. So if you know you want to
Starting point is 00:22:41 stay longer, offer to sign a longer lease. So this is the easiest bargaining chip that I have seen and I see it work countless times. So say for example, if you want to lock in a year and a half lease, two year lease, three year lease, and you can even stack these up and say, hey, if I sign a three-year lease, will you keep the rent here? If I sign a two-year lease, will you keep the rent here? Or a year-and-a-half lease, will you keep the rent here? And you can talk through that process with your landlord. Landlords want you to stay. There's two great things about this, is you lock in the price for those years, so you don't have to worry about it getting jacked up again on you, and you don't have a 30% increase the next year and another 30% increase the year after that.
Starting point is 00:23:19 And in addition, you get the price that you want. Now, one thing that you can add to sweeten this even more is say, hey, if you want to increase it at the rate of inflation, then we can have that discussion. If you are worried about inflation, a lot of people are worried about inflation right now. So if they're worried about inflation and you sign a three-year lease because you love the house that you're in, it's in a great area, something along those lines. And you sign a three-year lease and say, hey, if inflation goes up 5% next year, then I will increase the rent percentage, at least 5%. And you can kind of talk through some of that as well so that it's a win-win deal for you and the landlord. But the best way to do it for you
Starting point is 00:23:52 is to lock in the price for those three years. The next one is to offer to pay more rent up front. Now, most people can't do this. Most people can't pay a significant sum of their rent up front, and most people don't want to because it's not the best place to put your money. Your money is better suited adding to investments or things like that. But this is something where if you need to get the price down, if you're getting a 30% return on your money by paying it up front
Starting point is 00:24:15 so your rent doesn't go up 30%, then I would go ahead and do that because that's a much higher return than you're going to get doing anything else right now. So this is something where you just have to think through the situation and what's going on currently and saying, hey, if you have the means to do this, if you can pay three, six, nine, or even 12 months rent and get a really good deal on your rent and your landlord likes that, then I would consider that as well. Here are some other things that you can put into play. Maybe you can offer to give up a parking spot. And if you offer to give a parking spot, the landlord can charge more for that parking spot to another tenant. So they can make more money on that frontage and it helps reduce your rent.
Starting point is 00:24:52 If you don't have a pet in place, point that out. Landlords don't really love having pets. There's a reason why there's a pet deposit and they make you pay more because a lot of times pets can tear up the property or at least just make it a more dirty environment. Now, you could say I have the cleanest pet in the world? Absolutely. But that's not what landlords think typically when they rent out the property. Another thing you could do is offer to extend the termination notice that you have to give the landlord
Starting point is 00:25:16 from 30 to 90 days. I love this one because it's just an extra bargaining chip that you can throw in. If you're close on a negotiation, you can say, hey, I will give you 90 days notice if I'm going to leave or terminate this lease. And landlords love that because it gives them 90 days to find another tenant before you leave and they can turn over the property the day you leave instead of having to wait a whole entire month and losing a month's rent. That's a great bargaining chip as well, and you can say that to them.
Starting point is 00:25:41 Say, hey, I will give you a 90 day notice. I will also allow you to bring new renters into the property while I'm still living here so that you can get this leased out as fast as possible. That way, you don't lose a month's rent and have to worry about turning over the property while there's no tenant and nobody paying inside of this unit. Another creative one is you can make a deal for referrals if they have low occupancy.
Starting point is 00:26:07 So if it's like a 12-unit apartment building and that landlord only has five of those units rented, for example, you can say, hey, if I find referrals, will you reduce my rent or give me a month's free rent for each person that I get into the building? And that's another thing that you can work through and do. And one easy way to do that is then you can post it on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist and just help them out and find tenants for them.
Starting point is 00:26:28 And they may be willing, this is a side hustle technically, but they may be willing to give you a free month rent per tenant or half off of that month or whatever else you can do. But that's a creative way to think through this as well. And that's what I want you to take away from this. Is all negotiations, specifically when it comes to your rent, you should treat this like a business deal. And the best business people are the ones that can come up with really creative ideas.
Starting point is 00:26:49 to make things happen. That's the cool thing about all things in real estate. When you're doing real estate deals, some of the best real estate investors that I know are the most creative people when it comes to dealmaking. So if you can get creative with your landlord telling them, here's a bunch of different ideas that I have to reduce the rent, and let's work together on this.
Starting point is 00:27:06 And if you could think of some other creative ideas, I'd love to hear them. So make sure you send them over to me as well because I think this is a really cool thing that you can add as you start negotiating throughout this process. Now, step five, you have to learn how to handle objective. So handling objections is one of the most important things when it comes to negotiating.
Starting point is 00:27:25 And no one in any negotiation is going to give you every single thing that you want. If you're walking into this thinking you're going to get every single thing that you want, the likelihood is very low. It's possible, but it's low. So you want to be as respectful as possible here. And the best way to do this is to learn how to negotiate with scripts. So here's a really easy exercise that you can do. Most of the time, you're going to have an idea of what your landlord must.
Starting point is 00:27:49 may not go for. So make a list of this and just say, if my landlord objects to X, I'm going to offer Y. And you're going to write out a list of these on a sheet of paper so that you can write out every single possible objection
Starting point is 00:28:04 that you can think of. Write out every objection that you can think of throughout this process. And if you have these on a sheet of paper, now you have rebuttals for each objection that are respectful rebuttals, but you have a response, especially if you are not quick
Starting point is 00:28:17 at thinking on your feet, which some people are not when you're in a negotiation because if you have stress and anxiety, it can be a difficult thing to think on your feet. Well, if you have these scripts in place where you say, hey, if they will not decrease my rent by $400 from what they are actually offering to increase my rent by, then I'm going to offer 200 but giving up my parking spot. And you're going to try to meet in the middle that way. So you can think of a bunch of different situations that could happen within this negotiation and what your rebuttal is going to be. This is part of knowing exactly what you want.
Starting point is 00:28:47 and this is why you want to know exactly what you want, is piecing together this deal creatively. How can you piece this deal together creatively and being firm and assertive so that you can get the majority of what you want and that you're happy with your situation? Now, those are the five steps to negotiate like a pro and being prepared to negotiate with your landlord.
Starting point is 00:29:07 Now here's a bonus for you. If negotiation brings you extreme anxiety, there's only one thing that you can do here. You need to practice as much as possible. When you practice negotiating, you want to practice in low stakes environments. Get your friends together, get your family together, make yourself a little bit uncomfortable,
Starting point is 00:29:23 and start the negotiation process. You can even give them a bunch of objections, and then you're going to handle those objections with some of your scripts that you put together. So put together some of these scripts, work on these objections, work through this negotiation, because you're going to feel really comfortable
Starting point is 00:29:37 if you practice this. The more you practice it, the more comfortable you're going to be. And like I said, this can save you thousands of dollars per year, so it's worth putting in this little extra effort to be able to do that. If it takes you two hours to prepare for the negotiation, and it takes you two hours of just practicing negotiation, four hours, where you can save thousands of dollars,
Starting point is 00:29:56 let's just say you save two grand throughout the year, you made $500 an hour by doing that. So it's worthwhile to put in this effort so that you can negotiate properly and make sure that you get the best deal for yourself in your financial situation. Because financial independence is riding on it. Imagine if you can invest in an additional $2,000 per year, and you can invest, towards your retirement accounts, that's a massive difference over the course of 30 years. So grab a friend, grab a family member, work on practicing through some of this stuff so that you can get comfortable. Even if you aren't comfortable in negotiation, try it out with someone who's around and just see, hey, am I as good at this as I think I am? And you can figure out, hey,
Starting point is 00:30:35 what are some of these objections? Where are my weak points within my negotiation so that you can get better and better and better at this? And if it feels really awkward, I know it can feel really weird. I know it can feel awkward. If that's you, if it feels awkward, just know, is it worth feeling awkward so that you can save thousands and thousands of dollars? I think it is for most people, but you're going to have to work on this over time. And if you have a year before your lease is up and you want to practice negotiation, it's an awesome, awesome skill to have. That's what it is. It's a skill. It's not something you're born with. You're not a great negotiator when you're born. You have to actually practice it over time. So practicing it is an amazing
Starting point is 00:31:14 skill that you can put together and sometimes you just got to put yourself out there a little bit and work through some of this stuff. I know this because I am actually an introvert and being introverted is something where I had to work through this to kind of bring myself to an extroverted state when I have these negotiations. So it's one of those things that over time you get better and better and better at it and creativity really helps within some of these things. But once you get to that point where you're at least somewhat comfortable, then you can start the negotiation and be ready to roll. Now listen, if you guys have any questions about this episode, hit me up on TikTok or Instagram at Master Money Co. And don't forget to follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whatever
Starting point is 00:31:51 podcast player you love listening to this podcast tune. If you want to help out, leave a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you guys so much for leaving those reviews. I truly appreciate it. And if you know somebody who wants to learn how to build wealth, share this podcast with them, because we have a bunch of episodes coming out that I'm really excited to share with you guys. I can't thank you guys enough. for listening to this episode, and we will see you on the next episode. Rosen lasagna, medium power, 15 minutes. Sounds like Ojo time. Let's play.
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