I saved my family $40/month today! That’s $480/year! How? Cutting off the Internet and texting on my cell phone. I am home the majority of the time and there is just no reason that I can’t just use the laptop! Yes, I like my fancy phone and the convenience of checking my email while in the line at the grocery store, but I survived just fine the first 30 years of my life without it! And I am confident that I could cut my bill back some more if necessary.
I am entitling this post “part 1”, because I plan to regularly check my bills and “Tighten the Belt” even more. So if you are needing to tighten your belt, why not check your phone bill and see where you can cut back? You may be overpaying!
I am too cheap to pay for email and texting. I ALMOST added a texting package recently, but if I was going to do it, I’d want to be able to text M too, and so then I had to do it for BOTH phones and so it just escalates from there. I really wasn’t planning on using it much anyway, except that my niece is a textaholic and I wanted to be able to text her. Then it occurred to me to that okay, I found five bucks a month an acceptable charge. So, that’d be the equivalent of 25 messages at .20 each, or say, twelve and a half exchanges. That is more than I would probably want to send anyway. PLUS, you can send text messages for free from the AT&T website (if you’re a customer of theirs, of course) so when I’m at home, I will just log into their site and send her a message, thus cutting the cost in half.
So.. works for me. I have the option but I have to consider “is this worth twenty cents to me?” (Like, it was worth twenty cents to me to invite a certain mis-texting friend over to do my dishes..haha!) Even though I spend more per message than if I had a plan, I spend MUCH less overall.