Save Money On Your Phone Bill

Save Money On Your Phone Bill


Do you have huge phone bills? Between home phone, long distance, cell phones, family plans, text messaging, it all gets overwhelming and expensive. Below are my tips on reducing your phone bills.

1. Drop the land line: The first tip to save money on the phone bill is to drop the land line. Some times this can be challenging especially if you have kids that don't have cell phones however most do. So if you can drop the land line, and just rely on the cell phones, do so and you can save a minimum of $35 per month or more.
2. Drop the features: If you can't part with the land line the next best way to save money on your phone bill is to start dropping features from the land line. If you can get down to the bare bones you will save the most money. For example drop the long distance service, save $2.50, use a calling card instead, drop call waiting, save $4 per month, I hate call waiting, there is nothing more iratating than when you call someone and they say hang on just a minute I have another call. They put you on hold to find out it was only some sales call. It really shows you how you rank in their world.
3. Calling cards: We have been buying calling cards from Sam's Club forever. These are great for making long distances calls. It is like $.04 per minute which is a pretty good deal. We usually buy the 1000 minutes at a time for $40. Consider using these for kids in college as well.
4. Cell Phone Family plans: I haven't gone down this path yet because I am still too cheap however, a lot of people get the family plans for their cell phones. Some programs allow you to get 4 or 5 phones and you can share your minutes and texting. I think it is a good idea however the programs start at around $70 per month. It is still a little to rich for me.
5. Free Texting: Did you know that if you have a Yahoo account that you can text on yahoo for free. This works out great for teenagers because they can text their friends for free. You just goto Yahoo mail and click on the new button and then click SMS. Pretty cool, you don't have to pay $.15 per message to either send or recieve.
6. Buy a texting package: As most of us know that have teenages, kids don't talk to each other anymore. No sense in picking up the land line and talking to each other when you can get on AIM or text message someone on your cell phone. Anyway my kids wanted to text more so they bought a monthly package at ATT which gives them 1000 texts for $10 per month. Its is a good deal and get the cost of texting down to $.01 per messages.
7. Bundling: Make sure you investigate bundling your service providers. Determine which one is better for you the cable company or the phone company. Both offer TV, internet, calling etc. Make sure you find our what the fixed prices is including taxes. Don't be fooled by just taking the introductory offer of 12 months at $100. It could go up a lot after the introduction is over.
8. Pay as you go cellular: If you are not doing the family plan on your cell phone. Consider switching to a pay as you go phone. We buy the $100 ATT card which last for a year. We end up using it up in 6 months, however $200 per year is a great deal for a cell phone. The only down side is if you want one of the coolest latest phones then you are going to have to shell out some initial investment for the actual phone. Like $200 to $300. However, if you consider the minimum cost for a cell phone contract is $40 per month which is $480 per year the payback is pretty quick.
9. Skype or other VOIP: If you do a lot of long distance consider using Skpe or another VOIP provider. You can make long distance calls for $.02 per minute to places like Japan and Europe. Pretty amazing. If you buy the package you can get almost unlimited calling for around $25 per month. Skype especially works well when you are traveling overseas and you want to call home and chat for an hour. You can even install Skype on your cell phone.