Here’s a place to look to see if you are giving more of your money away than you need to. How many cellular phone minutes do you have left over each month? More than 10%? You may be throwing money away. (in fact, the cellular companies count on it).
No one likes to go over the minutes on their rate plan. If you do, it tends to get pretty expensive. I think that the cellular companies have conditioned their customers over the years to error on the side of having lots of minutes left over so that their bill is predictable. But is this a good thing?
Go back and look at your past bills. When you take the total payment to the company and divide by the number of minutes you used, what does it come out to? Probably more than you thought. Now don’t count the free minutes you get on evenings and weekends. Just count your “anytime” minutes. You may find that you are consistently coming in wayyyy under your maximum. If that’s the case, call your cellular company and find out what plans they have that are closer to what you are using. Even if you tend to go over by 100 minutes, does this work out to more or less than the plan you are on today? (For some plans, it can be cheaper to just go over a bit, than it is to have their higher rate plan). Just be careful. Just like they love it when you aren’t paying attention and consistently don’t even come close to using your minutes, they also like it when they can slap you with ridiculous overage charges.
Another place you should look, is at the customer services that you are getting with your cellular phone. Are you using them? Have they added services to your account for a free trial period, and now they are costing you money? That happened to me a couple months back. They put a free service on my bill, which I didn’t even use. I didn’t notice it until the free period was over and I started getting billed. Needless to say, they got a phone call from me.
So, check it out. Are you paying for a lot of unused minutes? Are you paying for services that you aren’t using? You might just save a buck or two.