Phones

I spent a lot of time working on my budget, I made sure I knew where the money was going and if it was a good thing that it went towards. One of the biggest drains I found on my budget was my cell phone service. The first thing I did with it was get rid of the data plan, I didn't really need it anyway, I had internet access almost anywhere I stopped anyway and because my e-mail service was accessible via a web browser there really was no purpose, that one change saved us probably about $60 a month, for others it will probably save more. However, this wasn't enough for me, I wanted to make my money go farther.

The next step in this phone process was looking at my home phone service, I knew this had a lot of potential to save me money because a home service can provide cheaper unlimited calling compared to what cell phones offered (and at this time there wasn't even unlimited available). I had service currently through my cable provider, it was expensive. Someone at my church introduced me to a VOIP provider who offered unlimited service for $200 for the year, it didn't take much number crunching to realize this was a fairly good deal compared to what I had (a savings of about $23 a month). So I went with this and was happy enough for a year, then it came time to renew and I did and another year passed. During the following year the company was closing its doors and I had to find someone else, there were others who offered something similar and I checked them out, however their service was crappy and support was unhelpful and slow, so I tried another company. Their service wasn't very good either and eventually I went with a more familiar, but more expensive service. At first I went with their 500 minute plan, but I didn't like having to keep track of the minutes and worry about it, I already worried about my cell phones, it was just too much stress, so I went with their unlimited plan.

Time passed and I looked at my budget again, I had been trimming a lot of fat in a lot of different areas, but the phone situation still bothered me. I kept looking for better deals on cell phone service, but couldn't find any that I liked. Eventually I decided to look at the pay-as-you-go plans, I crunched the numbers, figured out how much my minutes were costing me and realized that if I made the right changes I could save quite a bit of money. So when we could we switched to a pay-as-you-go service and cut back a lot of our monthly bill, but this wasn't enough, my home phone service was costing me a lot too and we didn't use a ton of minutes. As I continued researching I found many options out there, compared to a cell phone plan it was still a good deal but we weren't using it enough to make it worth the money. I finally found some tricks I could do and informed my wife that we would try them out, if they didn't work it didn't matter because we would just use our cell phones instead. So, after a bit of investing the money I have a small balance due to my savings from my phone budget, but I got my phone budget down to $30 a month right now and it could probably go lower once the balance is paid off. To put it in perspective, when I started off making a budget I was spending somewhere around $160-180 a month and now, after some years of research and making small changes, I'm down to likely less than $30 a month! That's a very major change for us, we can do a lot with $130 more per month!

So what do I want to impart in my story? Well, I want you to think about how much you spend on your phones, they're expensive and you should probably be asking yourself, do I really need all that I'm paying for? Do you really have to have the data plan? Do you absolutely need the home phone service? Is it saving you money? Crunch some numbers, find out how much you're paying per minute. Are there more savings to be had? It's possible that you can go with fewer minutes on your cell phone by using a home phone service and realize some savings. Take a look at it, see what's available, you could be surprised how much of your budget you can free up by asking some of these questions to the things you spend your money on.