Josh Elledge - Chief Executive Angel
Cell phone discount podcast
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- My oldest son and my daughter joined me this year at Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Orlando. We had a blast getting scared silly – plus I had the opportunity to interview Halloween Horror Nights’ project show director, Charles Gray.
- If you’ve never heard of PowerPerx, they are the company that GUARANTEES you will save with them for everything from your health insurance to your cell phone bill.
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SavingsAngel.com VIP membership is just $3.99 a week and you will save more than $100 a month or your money back!
Call the cell phone discount podcast hotline with your question or comment: 407-205-9250
Links mentioned in this cell phone discount podcast:
- Power Perx – SavingsAngel friends get a 33% discount IF you enroll before October 31st. Use the coupon code ANGEL or this link.
- My review of Power Perx – and how to get the biggest savings and a 7-day free trial.
- Halloween Horror Nights
- RetailMeNot app
Transcript of my conversation with Bud Lethbridge of PowerPerx:
Josh Elledge: And Bud, thank you so much for joining us.
Bud: Hey, I'm glad to be with you. Thanks for the invite.
Josh Elledge: Yeah, absolutely, all right. Well I’m really excited to have you on, because when you explained to me what Power Perx does. I got pretty excited because, right now I know that there are so many people that are not getting currently the value that Power Perx provides, and so I’m wondering if you could just kind of explain generally what Power Perx is and the general – kind of like the value that you bring to consumers.
Bud: Yeah, I’d love to, Josh. In fact, let me just say that, first of all, you and I go back a lot of years and I kind of lost your contact for a while. And when I saw what you were involved in with SavingsAngel, it just seemed like this will be right down the alley of your members because it seems that from what I know SavingsAngel and you are in the business of saving people money…
Josh Elledge: Yeah.
Bud: And that’s exactly – that’s exactly what we do at Power Perx. We’re savings organization and that's not a new concept. There is lots of companies out there, I mean from Retail, you got Costco to on the Internet Groupon and other organizations out there. But we do things differently. In fact one of the major things that makes us different is that when we go in and negotiate Power Perx deals with our merchants, we negotiate nothing for ourselves. So we’re not looking for kickbacks or splits or commissions and we won't take them. If there is room for that kind of thing then we tell that merchant, no, we want you to give that deal to our member. And so we’re all about saving money, and now we have nothing to sell, we have nothing for people to buy at Power Perx. We’re just about taking things that they would normally spend money on, and helping them spend a whole of a lot less. That's what we are all about at Power Perx, Josh.
Josh Elledge: Yeah, well one of the biggest areas, and this one is – this one is I think going to get people a little excited. It got me really excited, and that is, is that, you have a phone savings program. And when I first saw them, I’m like oh, this is not going to apply to me, or I may have to switch my carrier, that's not the case. And I think again when you share exactly how it works, I think people are going to get pretty excited. So explain how the phone savings works, because the cell phone bills we know are just out of control for so many of us, and you can offer savings without having people switch carriers. How does this work?
Bud: Yeah, it’s really cool Josh. In fact, it's one of the things we're super excited about at Power Perx because we know that everybody and I mean everybody has a cell phone and the bills are pretty high. They’re spending a lot of money, you know the – if you got mum and dad and maybe a kid or two, it's not unusual for people to be spending 200, 300 bucks a month on their cell phone bill and…
Josh Elledge: Yeah.
Bud: …that was one of the core areas where we said, hey we want to start save people money, and so we spend a tremendous amount of time, lots and lots of effort out there with the major cell phone companies negotiating, so that our members could take advantage of some substantial savings. In fact right now we got 10% to 18% based on the carriers. So the idea is people become a Power Perx member, and in fact the first thing we encourage them to do once they’re member is go to our website, they click on their carrier, they follow a couple of really easy steps in fact we’ve timed this, it takes 1 minute and 45 seconds to do the sign up process. They put in their cell phone number, they put in a little bit information about their account, with their carrier and then they’re going to get an email from their carrier usually in less than two minutes, and they’re going to click the confirm and their discount is in place from between 10% to 18% again depending on the carriers. So there is no switching, there is no messing around, and there is nothing else they have to do. So we call this benefit, One and Done. You do something once and you got that savings down as long as you’re Power Perx member. Pretty cool, huh?
Josh Elledge: It is, and I’m a huge fan of easy automatic savings. So I mean if you didn't realize, your cell phone provider, they offer discounts to different organizations, and groups, and people that might qualify in certain circumstances, but that doesn't – that's not available to what percentage of population would you say?
Bud: Well, here is the bottom line. We cover 86% of the cell phone market out there, and I would say that probably less than 5% of that market is currently participating in any kind of a discount program. Now I think Josh you and I talked about, you’re a vet, and by the way thank you for your great service to our country.
Josh Elledge: Thank you.
Bud: And as of that you get a discount with your cell phone carrier.
Josh Elledge: Right, I do.
Bud: Yeah, so that's get that. Some people when they’re part of a large company, and again the interesting thing is 70% of the workforce is working for small companies that don't get these kind of benefits. But if you are looking for a – working for a large company you might be able to get a benefit through the company. But here is the crazy part, a lot of times people are part of an organization that has a discount and they don't even know it. So they’re not getting it anyways. So the beauty of Power Perx is we make sure they get it, we show you how to do it, we make it super easy like I said less than two minutes. One and Done, you never have to worry about it again. And you’re just saving money. So it is a lot, in fact we got a letter the other day Josh, from one of our members, a guy named Scotty Halls, sent us a letter and he said, hey it took me two minutes to sign up, and I’m saving $58 a month on my cell phone bill.
Josh Elledge: Oh my gosh!
Bud: So it’s a big deal.
Josh Elledge: I love this because, again as you – I love finding these areas where – what are you losing when you do this. Like for example, you know, if it’s you are shopping smarter at the store and using coupons. Well, the only area that you're not spending money on is just retailer or manufacturer profits, so it makes sense to do that. So in this case that extra money that you’re losing right now it could be as — again in case of the letter that you got $58 a month, did you know, that's just going to cell phone profit. So take advantage of this discount, but cell phone savings are not the only area that Power Perx will help you save money. Now this next one is an area that this affects me personally. And it's one Bud, that I’ve done a lot of research on, because I’ve been, you know, I was in a situation we had a Grandfathered Health Insurance Policy, and for the longest time my family and I have been able to cover – be covered on an okay plan, it is not great. But we were able to pay about $650 a month to keep our family of five covered. So it was a really great price. However, we got a letter saying that because of the ways the laws have changed and other factors, they are no longer able to offer us that plan anymore. So we had to go into the market place and Bud, our insurance rates have now gone from $650 a month to protect our family to now over $1,200 a month. That is aside from my mortgage, I mean by far my biggest expense now for my family. And there are different ways that you can provide health protection to kind of mitigate the cost of health care for your family, and Power Perx offers that.
Bud: Yeah, we’re so excited about this one, Josh, because as you said it’s a big deal for a lot of people. Now, you and I are self-employed and so we’re paying all of our health care for our families, and I got five kids and so, man, it costs a lot of money these days as you've already talked about. But there is a lot of folks out there that are working for a company where they’re still having to bear up pretty good chunk you know maybe their employer is paying for the employee themselves, but then they're having to pay the portion that covers their spouse and their children, something like that. We just tell our members. “look, if you're paying all or any part of your health insurance, and you want to start saving a lot of money and have better control over your health care. You need to look at Power Perx and what we offer through our membership.
The concept, Josh is called “Health Sharing”, it's actually been around for years and years, but it's not insurance, which is such an awesome thing to get out from under the ugly burden of insurance because as you and I now know, when you do have a claim you're going through all this red tape and hassle and will they or won’t they cover me and then you got the HMOs and the PPOs, and can I go to this doctor, and can I keep the doctor that I want and all those kind of things that we've heard in the news and what not. With this program you go to any doctor, you go to any hospital you want, it's just a beautiful program. And not only is this dropping peoples' rates tremendously, I'll just give you an example. We had a member, just a couple, husband and wife in their 50s, paying a little over $700 a month just for the two of them, and they switched to this plan and under this program they’re now paying less than $300 a month.
Josh Elledge: Oh my gosh!
Bud: So saving over 400 bucks a month, guys that's – I mean that's like $5000 a month. I mean a year, Josh, that's a lot of money. And here is the other thing. The total out of pocket for an entire family for me is 1500 bucks. On my previous insurance plan my out of pocket was about $4000 a year. And so there is none of this 80:20 or anything like that it's just a $1500 out of pocket I know that's what I’m going to have.
Josh Elledge: Right.
Bud: And I go to whatever doctor I want, it's such a beautiful plan. So people are really excited about this, because it's giving them greater choice, greater control and of course saving them a ton of money.
Josh Elledge: This is a huge no-brainer. And I’ll just say that I spend a lot of time networking with other top personal finance pros, and there is a huge movement among those who I would consider to be among the most money smart people I know, and everybody is in agreement that a health sharing plan is just common sense under the current laws, and the current environment, and the current cost of healthcare. So this makes a lot of sense, Bud, this is a no-brainer for my family and I. I’m looking forward to seeing how much money I can save, and I’m absolutely going to report that when we make that switch. And so now again there is a few other, there is other benefits to Power Perx, I'm wondering if you could just kind of cover those real briefly what that is, and then we’ll talk about how people can make sure that they’re getting all of the savings that we talked about. Oh my gosh, I can't imagine the persons like, who is listening to this, it's like, Oh my gosh, my health insurance rates just went up today and I’m paying so much more for my cell phone bill, all right how do I get started, but before that, Bud I’m wondering if you can again kind of share some of the other benefits that are included in the Power Perx’s membership?
Bud: Yeah, well because you and I talked about this a little bit obviously on this program, Josh, we don't have time to go over all the benefits. There are so many, but I do want to give your listeners just a few other ideas and by the back on the health sharing, I do want to say one thing, and that is a lot of folks are concerned about the tax, or the penalty that can be imposed if you don't have the proper health care, or you don't have any health care. And so what we've talked about today, does meet that standard. So there is no tax, there is no penalty we're meeting the government standard, and so I just wanted everybody to know that. But on some of the benefits, let me just tell you about a couple of them really quick. We're super excited about our “Home and Auto Insurance”.
In fact we just got a letter from a Brady, T.E, I’ll just use his last initial, and he said, he is saving $784 a year through Power Perx on his auto insurance, and so what we do is we shop about 30 to 40 different companies out there to give you the very, very best rates. And of course we negotiated group rates, and so rates that people couldn’t get on their own, and so they're going to be able to save a lot of money. Usually about 80% of our members were able to save money. What that means is there is about 20% of them out there who have got an incredible rate, and so what we’ll do for them is we’ll still go shopping, and sometimes we’ll come back and say, “Hey, just want to let you know you got an incredible rate” and so they get that peace of mind knowing, okay, I didn't have to go through the hassle, I didn't have to go through a lot of work, and I found out my rate is great, but 80%, you're going to able to save money. Yeah, it’s a big deal.
Josh Elledge: You know, and I guess, I could see how that could be the case because again if you’re buying strength in numbers, typically you’re going to get a better rate as opposed to just going directly to the company and saying “No, sorry I don't have any friends with me, it’s just me, what can you give me”? You just have no negotiating power, so great. Yeah.
Bud: Yep. That's the whole idea of how this works, and we’ve done the same thing with taxes. I mentioned earlier, Josh that we have nothing to sell, we have nothing for people to buy. We’re trying to take things that people have to spend money on anyway, and save them a lot of money. So we said, hey everybody has to get their taxes done, and one of the interesting things is a lot of folks are either trying to and doing themselves or they are going to some cheap out pick [phonetic], because they don't want to spend a lot of money, we’ve negotiated with one of the top CPA firms in the country, they’re licensed in all 50 states, and the first and foremost thing is, they'll typically save you a lot of money on your tax return itself. But we've negotiated with that company that they will give Power Perx members 20% to 30% off whatever they paid last year for the same return. So if they got a business return done, give them 20% to 30% off, whatever they paid for that. If they have their personal return done or even both, 20% to 30% off of that. We don't even know what they pay. We're just blanketly saying, “Look we’re going to drop that fee for you, we're going to save you a lot of money”. So again we’re just excited to deliver savings to our members.
Josh Elledge: That's incredible. So again I’ve always – when you are self-employed. I mean you really just need to hire an accountant because return, I won’t say return on investment, but that they will really help you navigate beyond what I have seen software allow you to be able to do as intelligence we want software to be – just unfortunately with the complicated tax code that exists, you know that if you have very bright minds who can navigate that for you, you’re just going to reduce your tax burden, and in our case significantly. So that's what we’ve always made in the investment. So if we can spend a lot less and get the same value that sounds great. Now, Bud I really want to talk about how someone get started with this, because this is again just on numbers, it’s a no-brainer but there is a very, very small investment, and I’m wondering if you could kind of cover how that works.
Bud: Yeah, but before I do Josh, let me just say one more thing to your listeners, because I know this will be important to them. We have both our website and a GPS driven app that all of our members get and between the website and the app they’re able to access over 350,000 merchants that we’ve negotiated with all over the country. So for example they could get discounts on movie tickets, they can get discounts on going to Disneyland, on travel related items like hotels and car rentals they can save money on everything from an oil change, to a haircut and because it’s GPS driven they can find merchants in their local area. So I just want to fill that in, but let me tell you how people get started. So we love partnering with organizations like yours Josh, because we know that your members are shabby folks that are looking for ways to save money anyway. So because we don't take any kickbacks, commissions, splits like I talked about earlier, the way Power Perx is able to survive is by a small month to month membership fee.
Now first of all, I want to emphasize what I just said which is month to month, that means we have no contracts, we don't ask for any term. So before I even tell you what the membership fee is, people need to understand, look if you paid the fee and then you weren’t saving any money, the next month you wouldn’t pay it again, and so just with the cell phone benefit alone, most people are covering more than the cost of our membership, that membership fee, Josh is $14.95, that's it, $14.95 to get all of the savings that Power Perx has to offer each month. And what I’m super excited about is that we want to make special offer to your listeners.
Josh Elledge: Okay. Let’s do it.
Bud: But I wasn't sure if you want to break the news, or if I was going to break the news. Do you want me to?
Josh Elledge: Do it, do it, do it. Save us some money.
Bud: Save it. We’re going to take lifetime $5 a month off the membership, now if you go to our website you'll see that our membership is $14.95 a month, and we sell our memberships every single day at that price. But your listeners Josh are going to use the promo code Angel, A-N-G-E-L and they're going to get a lifetime membership of $9.95 a month, and when I say lifetime what that means is not only we drop the fee five bucks a month, and like I said most people are going to save more than that 10 bucks just off the cell phone bill alone, but what we’re also saying is we're going to guarantee that that fee will never go up for life. In other words maybe we'll raise the fee, but not to them they’re grandfathered in, they’re locked in. Your members will never pay more than that ever, and one of the thing Josh that's really cool, we have a program called “3 & FREE”. They just go on to our website, they'll see it, they can click on it. They can go out and refer three people to Power Perx and we’ll give them their membership for free for a year. Just refer three people.
Josh Elledge: That’s nice.
Bud: Yeah. So we got lots of ways for them to be saving money, and putting dollars in their pocket every single month.
Josh Elledge: Awesome. All right, well, I like this, and again and if Bud, just in case like they get started and they're like okay, well I’m going to try this and it looks like this sounds good, and they go through and for whatever reason they decide, oh gosh, I guess I’m only going to save, I don't know, it's like – it’s hard for me to create the situation, because it's like gosh, if you could save $10 on your cell phone and the likelihood of you saving $10 on your cell phone is really great. But let’s say that for whatever reason like they use like Podunk Tel [phonetic] or something like that and they’re not included. And then they just go through it and they are like, well, I decide this is not for me and they make that decision pretty quickly that they say, “Okay, I guess I don't want to do this”, how do they – I mean can they cancel or they–
Bud: Yeah, in fact, here is what I want to do for your members, Josh, we want to give them a seven day free trial.
Josh Elledge: Okay.
Bud: So we want everybody to just sign up for free, and the thing is it takes two minutes to go in and sign up for their cell phone discount. It takes literally just a couple of minutes to get a quote on your auto and home insurance. You can take advantage of these benefits, download the app, go out and use it with some local merchants. In other words in a day or two they could easily see how much money they’re going to save, and if any of your listeners, Josh, feel like in a week that, hey, I’m not sure, I’m going to save more than my membership, they can cancel within that week, and we don’t even charge their card.
Josh Elledge: Oh okay. All right, I like that. Okay, so at this point, I mean there's nothing to lose. I mean that you could absolutely make this work. So okay, so let's talk about how we get that deal. So first off, let me just tell you that if you go to savingsangel.com right now, scroll down on the right hand side you’re going to see the logo for Power Perx, that's going to click through to my article where I break down all of these benefits step by step, and give you the link so that you can enroll and you can get started with your family. Also if you get my email, look for in that email. Also another place you might want to look is if you’re connected with me on social media, I’m going to send that link right to you, so you could take advantage of this, so you can get this deal. Again normally $14.95 a month, with SavingsAngel again if you're just trying to Google this you’re not going to get this. It is $9.95 a month and you get the seven day free trial, so you can get everything all put in place and then you can show your loved ones, your spouse you're like, look this thing is working, this is great. We’re going to save this on our cell phone bill and it is kind of a no-brainer. So again make sure you look for that, don't bother doing all kinds of searching, I'm just going to give you the link, but if you do, now Bud, remind me will this work if they do go to powerperx.com, and they use the coupon code or the promo code Angel, A-N-G-E-L, that would also work for them too, right?
Bud: So if they do that, Josh it actually is going to be easier to track the memberships if they just go to your website but because we're using the promo code ANGEL, we’re going to know either way and so yeah, they can do it either way. We just prefer they just go to your site.
Josh Elledge: Yeah, we’ll make it easy for them. Awesome, well, Bud that sounds great, and I am going to be talking about Power Perx. I really love to talk a little bit more in the future episodes about health sharing plans, because I think there is a lot of good information that people want to know in terms of there have been a lot of changes over the past couple of years, and in terms of how they do insurance and how health sharing plan is different, and you know there may be some questions about how that works. I’d love to invite you on in a few weeks. Now I should also say that this offer Bud that we've made is through the month of October. So you want to take – you want to jump on this, because I know that, you know as a company that your company is growing, your prices will likely go up because you can’t raise the rates. In terms of the value that people are getting, I would imagine that you'll likely raise your rates in the future. So at this point absolutely take advantage of this. Don't waste your money on the cell phone companies, and on insurances and other services that you could be saving yourself a lot of money on. Let's go find you some free money and take advantage of this, and Bud I want to thank you so much for sharing this. This for me is like exciting, like I love finding like new ways of saving money, really, really easily. So as I was going through Power Perx and trying to understand this I was getting more and more excited with each benefit that you had put together for our members.
Bud: Well, we were just super excited to be able to offer this to your folks, because I know again that your members are the kind of people that are smart, they want to do these things that will put more money in their household budgets every single month to be able to do more as a family, to take care of their kids, you know be able to take a vacation or be close to their retirement goal, whatever it happens to be. I'm more excited to be part of that for people that's what we’re all about just saving the money. It’s funny also Josh, because you just said something about raising our rates, we actually had a consultant come in and meet with us this week, and they said why are you not charging $29.95 a month for this? And I said well, you know, we just want to make it available to everybody out there. He said, yeah but it's easily worth 30 bucks a month, you need to charge 30 bucks a month for this. I don't know what we're going to do in the future, you know right now we’re $14.95, but I’m so excited for the month of October to make the special offer to your listeners, $9.95 is just a killer deal. In fact I got to tell you one last letter, we had a guy name Tom, who wrote us this last week, and he said I joined Power Perx, I did the cell phone deal. He said I’m saving $12 a month, he said that's not a huge amount, but it's more than I’m paying for my membership. He said I would never quit. So, you know for some people they think – hey what if I only save a little. Well, even a little is a big deal, at the end of the year, that’s over 100 bucks that you're saving. And so this is about being smart with your money, that's really all it is.
Josh Elledge: I agree I agree. Well, Bud Lethbridge from powerperx.com. Thank you so much for joining us on the show, and again for the person who is listening to this, look for my email, go to savingsangel.com right now, grab that link on the right hand side, print out my articles, share it with your spouse, your loved one who ever. So that they know the benefit that they can get and also of course take advantage of the special offer that isn't available unless you use the right link, and the right promo code. Bud, thank you so much for sharing this with us, and making this offer available.
Bud: Josh, thanks for having me on board with your group today, and wishing all of them the very best and thanks again to you.
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