Wednesday 23 April 2008

How I cut my phone bill by 90%

We're pretty frugal when it comes to telecommunications. DW uses a prepaid "calling card" to make overseas calls - she just calls a local phone number and enters her account number and pin to connect overseas for very cheap rates (a few cents per minute). And we have a pair of "his and hers" matching mobile phones I bought a couple of years ago - they were "free" when we signed up for the $14 per month plan for each phone (which includes $10 of included calls). The benefit of having matching phones is that we have two chargers, so we can have one at work (we both work in the same office) and the other at home - saves on lugging the charger around with us. The two $14 plans also pool the included call value, so we can make up to $20 worth of calls each month without paying any more than the basic plan fee.

We also have a landline phone (I've had the same phone number for 40 years and kept it when I moved house), but it doesn't get much use - last month the line rental cost $32, but we only made $1.80 worth of phone calls all month!. Because the landline is from my ISP it does entitle me to a $10 monthly discount off my monthly internet bill, but that isn't enough to make it worth keeping the landline. So today I called the phone company to arrange for disconnection. After explaining why I wanted to close our phone account, I was offered a monthly $20 discount for the next six months. Combined with the $10 internet discount this means that our phone line is now effectively going to cost $2 a month rather than $22. A saving of 90% just by making one simple phone call.

Copyright Enough Wealth 2008

2 comments:

Debt Dieter said...

Are you on the cheapest possible home phone plan you can get? I'm only paying $19.95 for my home phone with Optus?

Anonymous said...

Wow good for you - what a saving. I tried to do a similar things with my phone company but they basically told me to go elsewhere if I thought I could get a cheaper service, they were not prepared to lower there prices. So I did go elsewhere and I am saving a bit of money.