I have been trying to deal with my cell phone provider by phone or email, which sounds logical, but HAH it's not.
So I finally made it down to their store with DH (don't even ask, but two phones requires both of us). I've had the same provider for 15 years, back when Corporate paid the bills. I changed plans a few years ago, and hadn't really noticed that after the contract was up I didn't renegotiate a new contract, and the charges started moving way up. It was up to $70 a month for the two phones, which we really didn't need. I mean, yes, we used them, but NEED did not equal $70 a month.
We went for a prepaid pay-as-you-go, with 99c only on days it's used, and no minute charges for family members. We stayed with the same provider, so kept our activations etc, and the annual savings will be around $750 - $850!
The other problem with our current plan had been that the same provider was our internet provider, but not the line provider and local and long distance were separate, and there were little charges all over the place. I went nuts trying to track some of them down, but our DSL/internet/local calls/long distance was over $150 a month, and quite a bit was miscellaneous little charges that made no sense to me or DH.
We bundled all the services together into one bill, at $59 a month, still high but unlimited local and long distance and high speed DSL, lots of features, and -- 
-- I got them to agree to clean up the mess of all the weird little charges. One simple bill and plan.
I also had to clean up AOL charges, which were supposed to be "free", but I hadn't quite realized that when my sister set up an account while she was staying here, she didn't cross over to the free account, and it was still linked to ours, and AOL had linked their charges into our phone company local provider and also into our long distance provider AND also into our DSL provider. Getting that cleaned up is still in progress.
Still, a good savings day.
I'm still working out the budget, trying to decrease these "line items" while figuring out the actual costs we have. One day at a time
Changing Cell Phone plans saved serious cash today
March 14th, 2009 at 10:53 pm
6 Responses to “Changing Cell Phone plans saved serious cash today”
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March 15th, 2009 at 12:05 am 1237075548
March 15th, 2009 at 01:02 pm 1237122162
I have to buy a minimum of $100 worth of minutes, which gives me an average of 30 minutes a month, if i were to use it that much, which i don't. So it works out to $8 a month, which is fine.
March 15th, 2009 at 01:03 pm 1237122191
I have to buy a minimum of $100 worth of minutes a year, which gives me an average of 30 minutes a month, if i were to use it that much, which i don't. So it works out to $8 a month, which is fine.
March 16th, 2009 at 07:05 pm 1237230348
I knew we didn't use our minutes each month, but I liked having the connection to my sister, who is never at home.
Quite a few providers have unlimited calling to "in plan" numbers, which include my sisters plan, my home phone, etc., in our case. It's just 99c on days you use it, with no additional charges for "in plan" calls. And 10c a minute for other calls, which Fern, you are exactly right, are "emergency only".
May 7th, 2009 at 10:39 pm 1241735996
May 7th, 2009 at 10:48 pm 1241736526