Cutting costs on your cell phone bill

To start of with, let me say that I really don’t like spending money I don’t have to. Call it an effect of my frugal, saving mindset, but even the smallest unnecessary expenditure has a way of eating away at me until I can find a way to rid myself of it. I have recently experienced this feeling every time it came to pay my cell phone bill.

Many people pay way to much for their cellular phone use

When it comes to my cell phone usage, I am really a minimalist. I have no need of large text messaging plans because I prefer to talk to people (I know, I’m weird) and I am usually working all day, which keeps me from talking for very long. If I just manage to have a plan that includes night and weekend minutes, I’m pretty good to go.

Since we got married, however, my wife and I have been on a plan with T-Mobile (no matter how you feel about the, they are the least expensive for every comparable plan). It was a MyFaves plan that included unlimited calling to any 5 numbers no matter which network they were on. In addition to this, we also had 800 minutes to use anytime as well as unlimited nights and weekends. The end result? Out of our 800 “anytime” minutes, we typically used about 110.

So, then began the process of determining whether or not we would come close to that limit if the calls to our “MyFaves” numbers were included in the regular minute usage. At the forefront of my mind what the idea that it didn’t do us any good to drop a service we were paying for if we only exchanged it for extra charges in overage minutes. So, I took 2 months to analyze our cell phone bills and do some math.

It turns out that, even when including all of the “MyFaves” minutes, we were still only using about 500 of our 800 allotted minutes for the month (you can thank my wife for most of those…).

Needless to say, we are now on a different plan and paying less every month than we were before. How much less? $10. I know, it’s not very much per month, but I can think of a lot of things I would rather spend $120 per year on than service we aren’t using with our cell phone provider. In all, I probably spend about an hour doing the math and the research, so that equates to about  $120/hour in extra money in our bank account.

We’re still getting all the service out of our plan that we want and need and I can sleep easier at night knowing I’m not wasting any more money here. Now, we just have to figure out where, exactly, to allocate that money. We could put it into one of our ING Direct sub-accounts, use it to pay off debt, or maybe even have a little bit of fun… The possibilities are endless!

Do you have any suggestions for saving money on cell phone service? Does anyone have personal experience with prepaid plans?

Photo by daryl_mitchell.