You gotta ask

Negotiate your way to a richer life

Negotiating is an important personal finance skill that can help you earn more and pay less. Bargaining effectively can have a huge impact.

The best negotiation tactics allow both sides to win, says Kwame Christian, host of the “Negotiate Anything ” podcast and director of the American Negotiation Institute.

1 Negotiating salaries Most managers expect job candidates to negotiate their salaries, but many people don’t even try when they’re offered a job, according to surveys by Robert Half, a human resources consulting company.

You can prepare for your negotiation by checking salary ranges from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, salary comparison sites such as Payscale or Salary.com, company review sites such as Glassdoor, or Robert Half’s salary guides.

Good negotiators also write down a strategic plan that outlines what they want and how they intend to ask for it, as well as a list of good alternatives, Christian says.

Settle on the salary before switching to other forms of compensation, such as a flexible work schedule, a new title, the ability to work remotely and paid time off, he recommends.

2 Buying a car In most negotiations, you’ll want to preserve a good relationship with the other person. Buying a car, however, is typically a “purely transactional” interaction so you can bargain harder, Christian says. Research the car you want thoroughly before you go to the dealership. Look for the invoice price on car comparison sites such as Edmunds.com and ask several dealerships to give you their best price on the car.

Knowing your bottom line — the maximum you want to spend on the vehicle — is particularly important because dealerships will often draw out the negotiating process to wear you down and get you to pay more, Christian notes.

3 Budgeting with your partner A recent survey by Fidelity Investments found that couples who communicate well are more likely to expect a comfortable lifestyle in retirement, rate their household’s financial health as excellent or very good and say that money is not their greatest relationship challenge.

But communicating well about money is hard, because “money is emotional,” Christian says. He recommends calming those emotions by acknowledging and validating them and then asking your partner open-ended questions to find out why they feel the way they do.

This article was provided to The Associated Press by the personal finance website NerdWallet. Want to suggest a personal finance topic that Quick Fix can address? Email apmoney@ap.org.