Trim the Cell Phone Bill

Last year we decided to reevaluate the $100/month we paid to our cell phone company for unlimited minutes and texts. It turned out that most of our minutes were to family, most of whom had the same carrier and thus wouldn’t count against minutes. So we called up our carrier and asked to be switched to the 750 minute plan, where we would share the 750 minutes between our two phones. They were obnoxiously persistent that we needed more minutes, even after I repeatedly pointed out that we always used less than the 750 after accounting for nights and weekends and the minutes with other customers of the same carrier. We were stubborn though and finally got switched to the cheaper plan. It has saved us about $30 a month.

It’s worth noting that there are certainly even cheaper options. We considered using MagicJack or other similar technology for a home phone, and then switching to prepaid cell phones. We also considered switching to google voice. For a variety of reasons (perhaps a topic for another post) we went the route we did. The point, though, is that the phone bill is often an expense ripe for restructuring.