I’m not a big gabber on the phone, so I tried to look for ways to save on my home phone and cell phone service. I used to be with Sprint on a fairly good corporate plan where I paid about $35/mo after taxes and fees. But I found myself only using about 100-150 minutes a month and figured there had to be a better deal out there for someone like me. I also had home phone service through Verizon which ran about $45/mo after fees, plus any long distance I used. I searched out a way to save on the $80/mo I was paying for phone service.

The first thing I tackled was my home phone service. This was about 2 1/2 years ago now when I moved into my first purchased home and VOIP was just starting to take off. After reading a bunch of reviews on DSL Reports and similar sites I was debating between the cheap Vonage plan ($14.99/mo for 500 minutes) and the cheap plan from Voicepulse ($14.99/mo for unlimited local and 200 LD minutes). Both had a bunch of bells and whistles my landline didn’t – caller ID, 3 way calling, call forwarding, email notification of voicemail, the ability to check voicemail from anywhere… the list goes on. The Voicepulse plan fit my usage better, but I was a little concerned because Vonage had a better reputation and I guess still does after all this time. I ultimately decided on Voicepulse because of the plan, and figured hey if I didn’t like it I could always switch. Well after 2 years I still have it, even after transitioning to working from home where having my phone access is pretty important, and am happy to say I’ve barely had any problems with it. The only major incident I can remember is it went out for about 3 hours on a Sunday night once, and they credited me back $5 for it. Definetly worth the $30/mo savings.
So now I focused on reducing my cell phone bill. I figured the only way I would get it under my current plan is to go to a prepaid plan. There were a lot of choices out there and after some research I narrowed it down to STIMobile (10 cents a min weekdays, 12 cents weekends) and TMobile to Go (once you buy $100 worth of top ups, its 10 cents a minute). Once I saw a deal on Fatwallet to get the T-Moblie phone + $15 worth of airtime for free I decided to jump on that. I also use my Dealpass strategy combined with coupons at Staples to get an effective 30% off the refill cards there – making my cost only 7 cents a minute. So for the 100 to 150 minutes I use a month I only pay $7-$10.50 with no commitment.

So with these moved I effectively lowered my phone charges from $80/mo to around $24/mo on average with little regret.

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