Suggestions to lower our phone bill??

[Ferdie]

Right now we are paying $195 a month for a land line, 2 cell phones and high speed internet service throught a package "deal" with Verizon. Our cell phone contract has expired and I would love to find a way to lower our phone bill.

 

I would prefer to keep our land line and 2 cell phones. We can do without the high speed internet, but it is really nice to have. I'm not sure where to start researching. Does anyone have any suggestions??

 

Thanks

[shell in SC]

Right now we are paying $195 a month for a land line, 2 cell phones and high speed internet service throught a package "deal" with Verizon. Our cell phone contract has expired and I would love to find a way to lower our phone bill.

 

I would prefer to keep our land line and 2 cell phones. We can do without the high speed internet, but it is really nice to have. I'm not sure where to start researching. Does anyone have any suggestions??

 

Thanks

 

 

How often do you use the cell phones? DS and I hardly ever use ours so we have pre-paid phones. We each go through about $30 worth of minutes every 6 weeks (10 cents a minute). net10 has turned out for us to be the cheapest. Most pre-paid plans charge you $1.00 a day, but they don't. I have had no problems with the service and the phone selection is pretty decent too.

 

Also if you have cable TV maybe you can bundle high speed and VOIP phone and save some money.

 

Good Luck!

[Ferdie]

Thanks, Shell!

 

We don't use our cell phones much so a prepaid cell phone is a great idea.

[Ottakee]

Call around. We could get phone, internet and cable (cell phone was an option as well) from AT&T or Charter for pretty good deals. You need to consider how much you use the phones, if your coverage area is good or not (we only have a few cell phones that will work where we live), how reliable the coverage is (outages due to weather, etc).

 

Right now I pay $95 for AT&T phone (unlimited US calling), DISH network with 2 receivers and DVR, and highspeed internet. Then I pay another $75-80 for 3 Alltell phones but we use them A LOT. I know there are plans that are cheaper if you don't need as many minutes.

[NicksMama-Zack's Mama Too]

and I seem to remember that we opted for slower uploading or downloading speeds in exchange for a lower monthly price (we pay $30 for dsl). We don't have long distance on our landline, but use phone cards. Our landline is $30 (30% of it in taxes and fees). I have a prepaid cell phone (Virgin Mobile) and I have to refill it every 3 months for $20. I don't use it to chat, so it works out well for us.

 

hth

K

[Sara R]

We are doing this too. When we researched it, this Tracfone deal turned out to be the best deal. You can get a camera phone, about 1100 minutes (if you use the right coupon code when you put the minutes on your phone) and 12-14 months of service for $100 total.

 

We are also switching our landline to MagicJack. $40 per year, total. Clark Howard talks about them a lot, and you can find out more information there. They have a deal going on now for 5 years of service for $100 (assuming they stay in business for that long). Still, if we get 3-4 months of service out of them that saves us money compared to our landline.

[rafiki]

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[Ferdie]

Thanks for the feedback, everyone!

 

This is exactly the information that I was hoping for. I have been meaning to shop around for a better deal since Sept. and, well, here it is Dec. already. LOL!

 

Thanks!