Since we don't have a home phone, cell phones are not an option. We had a 1400 nationwide family plan for my husband and myself through Verizon. All of our family is long distance and about 1/2 are also on Verizon. We do fairly well on our minutes, but occasionally go over and have to pay a good chunk for each minute we go over. I'm so excited that I have finally finished setting up our 10 numbers! If you don't know about it, it's 10 numbers (any network or even landlines) that you can add to your account that you can call with unlimited minutes, anytime. It's awesome. You can change the numbers anytime you want. I looked at the numbers we called the most, weeded out the Verizon wireless numbers (already get unlimited to those numbers) and added the top ten. I'm very excited, because this should prevent any more overages.
Also, while there I found out that we were eligible to save money on our monthly plan because of my husband's employer! Awesome! All I had to do was take in my husband's employee badge and now we'll be saving 19% each month! That's so awesome!
So, I am saving almost $30/month without anything changing with our service! I'm so excited. I just wish I knew about it sooner. Instead of wallowing in that though, I'll just be glad I know about it now. Yeah! That's $60 (if you count the cable changes from my last post) shaved off our budget without too much sacrifice.
Reducing More of the Budget - Cell Phones
August 26th, 2009 at 09:25 pm
August 26th, 2009 at 11:42 pm 1251330151
We were under some archaic Verizon Family plan (that had some perks) BUT we didn't have the free Verizon-to-Verizon calling. We had a really old plan, but liked the favorable off-peak hours.
We ended up adding our parents to our family plan and significantly reducing both our household cell bills. The icing on the cake is now we can all call each other for free any time. We figured we'd test it out with our old minutes, and we are actually using less minutes than usual, with twice as many people. Just to point out - there are various ways to improve cell costs.
Um, I will have to look into the 10 numbers thing!
August 27th, 2009 at 02:59 am 1251341990