Personal Finance and Family Finance ideas and articles from an LDS perspective.

This Money Saving Idea was submitted by a MormonFinance.com reader - Boss from Idaho.

Here’s my thoughts of saving phone bill money….

About a year ago, our financial life took a strong turn to the downside. We quickly found ourselves with too many bills, including about a $200/month landline/cell phone bill. We knew we had to make some changes to stay in the ‘Black’. So here is what we did in regards to our phone service.

1) Switch to Cell Phones. We decided that the cell phones were more useful than the landline. At the time, we were paying around $35/service and $20/long distance plan… Total $55. By stopping that service, we are saving over $600/year. Our cell phones have long distance.

2) Select Your Plan Wisely. Our cell phones had a high minute plan…. We never came close to using those minutes, but thought it was a ‘peace of mind’ plan to have thousands of minutes… That peace of mind was costing us into the hundreds. So, we found a local cell carrier that for $40/month had an unlimited plan, drawback was it only worked in a localized area… Not a problem, it became the ‘Home’ phone. I then got a month to month commitment - pay-as-you-go Plan. The wisdom in this is if needed I could add more minutes… But only if I needed to. Also, I choose a low-medium plan, thereby keeping my monthly fees down. Also another benefit was and I have used this only once, but was glad that I could, I could lower the plan for a month or two if money got real tight, and then bump it back up as needed… With no additional fees! This step has saved us around $50/month…. Another $600/year!

3) Try Digital Phone Service. During this time, we moved. The ‘local’ unlimited phone did not work in the new area. So we decided to use a ‘Digital’ Line. This was costing us about the same amount of money as the cell phone… So no real savings. It took a little getting used to. We now have a ‘headset’ to use on my computer if I need to make a call and a ‘Landline’ styled phone on our home computer. Other than getting calls in the middle of the night (computer is turned off), it works great.( the work around is simply to forward calls to your cell phone when you go to bed). We have used this system since earl last fall. For only $5/month we can add a 2nd line, which we use for our Business Line. We also did try Magic Jack… But found it to be very unreliable… If not familiar with it, it is only $20/year for a digital line. We were doing great with our Phone Plan, until just recently. My son kept telling me to check into Skype… I finally did… Wow! Even more savings! I can sign up for the unlimited plan for about $65/year. So this month, we are going to drop our other Digital Service that was about $35/month and change over to Skype… Saving about $30/month which equates to $360/year!

So let’s see… We started out with an average of $200/month Landline and cell phone bill. That $2,400/year. Our new phone plan costs us with tax a monthly bill of $43/cell and $7/digital line. So roughly $50/month or $600/year. That’s a $1,800/year savings… Hmmm… Now only problem is deciding what to do with that extra money!