Joining a Health Club
Thing No. 6
Look for resale memberships.
This can be a little dicey but there are deals to be had from people who are selling their memberships on ebay.com. You will likely have to pay their transfer fees (around $100) but they might have been able to flirt with the salesperson and score a great deal and you can potentially benefit from their suave moves.
Thing No. 7
Use your trial time to get the real scoop.
Go ahead and pester your fellow members and find out what they paid for their membership. Do some investigative reporting. These people are a treasure trove of information about the ins and outs. And, as you know, people just love to tell you all of their complaints which, of course, you want to know about before you have to experience them all for yourself. Don’t forget to pay attention to the towel situation, lockers, availability of toiletries and cleanliness. Even if you don’t normally shower at the gym, you may have to someday. You don’t want it to be traumatic.
Thing No. 8
Breakdown all the options.
Find out if you can transfer your membership to someone else, if there are fees for towels/locker or automatic debit payments. Breakdown every single amenity that you will have access to and every single cost you will be charged. Take a look at your cost per visit assuming realistic attendance and find out if you can turn it off when you go out of town.
Thing No. 9
Make sure you have an exit strategy.
You want to be able to cancel the contract at any time. Many gyms will try to foist a non-cancelable contract on you. Or, they'll only let you cancel if you move and your new location doesn't have a facility within 10 miles. Screw all that. You want to be able to cancel at any time. If you really can't wrangle a cancelable membership, at the very least, check the grace period for a full refund. (It can be anywhere from 7-30 days.) The legal “lemon law” is 3 days.
Thing No. 10
Negotiate. Hard.
These memberships are highly negotiable. More negotiable than cars. These guys have A LOT of wiggle room and they will start out presenting you with plans that are exorbitant. People say you should act dumb, poor and uninterested and those fees will drop like lead dumbbells. Definitely pit them against their competitors. We've seen initiation fees drop 80-percent with a half-hour of back-and-forth negotiation and monthly fees cut in half. Once you've driven the fees down to rock bottom, try to get that price for the shortest possible commitment. In general we don't like to see you signing up for more than 6-12 months because God only knows what will be going on in your life by then or if it will turn out that you don’t have the gym rat DNA after all. Which, is why we don’t even like to see you pay initiation fees at all. They can be few and far between but there are gyms that do not require them and operate on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Thing No. 11
Get it in writing and go home.
These salespeople will lie. Egregiously. They will tell you that Pilates classes are $2 when they are really $20. They will tell you that you can cancel when you can't. They will tell you anything. You think we're exaggerating? Think again. The Internet is full of stories of people being taken into back rooms by some Hans or Franz telling lies as fat as their heads: my3cents.com, consumercomplaints.com, pissedconsumer.com. “Trainers,” that is, who aren't the ones that are going to get personally sued. Lots of times, they'll show you the binder with all the different programs but won’t let you photocopy it. Review the contract at home. Carefully. You'll likely find lots of fascinating things they didn't tell you about. If they tell you the deal is only good for that day…they're lying.
Thing No. 12
Negotiate again.
Finally, just as you're about to sign on the dotted line, pause, put down the pen and start in on getting Hans to throw in some perks. A free class or two here, a private training session there. As they say, “work it.” If the salesperson is ready to push you through the plate glass window by the time you leave, your work there is done.
Thing No. 13
Say no to finance charges.
Never sign a membership contract that has finance charges attached to it. These will add up to a fortune.
Thing No. 14
No automatic renewals.
These guys will charge you for the rest of your life and then charge your children if you let them. Many of these Byzantine contracts include automatic renewals. Don't agree to it. In fact, if you can avoid authorizing them to charge your credit card without your signature that would be best. Again, horror stories like nobody's business about credit cards being charged after cancellation and other unauthorized nightmares that take months and months to get credited because everybody you talk to says that somebody else has to do that, complaint.bbb.org.
Thing No. 15
Bond with the bonded.
Many a local gym has gone out of business after the members have paid their fees. If they’re bonded, that means that money has been set aside to pay back membership fees. Some states require these performance bonds for health clubs.
Now, go you chicken fat, GO.
