I nearly had a heart attack when I opened up my cell-phone bill this month and found over $200 in charges for my plan that I share with my brother. (OK, I’m exaggerating—no heart attack, but a very red face and probably high blood pressure!)
I took out my calculator and started looking to see where I could trim costs. I quickly realized that we used less than 200 of our 1,400 shared minutes. And I only sent and received 12 text messages even though we were paying $30 extra for unlimited text messaging.
I called our carrier and reduced our plan down to 550 shared minutes, which isn’t advertised on the carrier’s Web site for family plans. That nearly cut our cost for our minutes in half. The less expensive plan didn’t include text messaging, so I added on different bundles—a $15 bundle for my brother who sends and receives lots of messages and a $10 package for me since I mainly use Blackberry Messaging instead of regular text messaging.
I still needed to add on for our e-mail and Web access plans, but reducing the number of minutes decreased our bill by $25 a month or $300 a year!
Looking to shrink your bill? Find out more ways to reduce your cell-phone bill, including shopping carefully for data plans and clicking through sites that help you compare plans based on your phone needs.Let’s hope we don’t suddenly have a chatty month and end up needing those extra minutes!
Have you had success cutting your phone bill? How do you save money on your wireless plan? We’d love to hear some of your tips!
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Sam Soong
01:38:10 PM on Sun Mar 28 2010
Great post. You've made a terrific start.
For me, prepaid rules. I did a bit of research and discovered NET10 was the best for my purposes. I don’t use a lot of minutes — maybe 200 or so a month — and I’m not a mad texter or websurfer either, but 10¢ a minute for calls and 3¢ for texts is crazy good. And no fees per day or other bs.
I got a very nice Samsung phone with a slide-out qwerty keyboard and no one knows it’s prepaid. Costs me a big $30 a month for all my stuff.
Kimberly
06:11:25 PM on Sat Apr 17 2010
Google voice sounds like a really interesting idea - I came across it when I was switching from my previous contract carrier. The thing is - I really wanted to actually get out my contract and phone issues totally rather than having to rely on another phone to relay my calls or messages. I'm not really much of a talker so I decided to go with a company who offered low cost minute plans with contract as well as low cost phones. While the phone selection is limited and I wasn't able to keep my previous number, the savings per month and on phones make it all worth it. The thing with prepaid is really about doing the research and finding out what company can work for you.