check your bills, and eliminate bells and whistles

Have you inspected your bills lately to see if there is anything you can cut back on or eliminate altogether?

I just checked our phone bill and found two things we can adjust that will save us a few bucks each month (this doesn't even include the Inside Wire Maintenance charges we eliminated last summer).

Here's what I did that should save us around $20-$25 each month:

1. I changed long distance plans. We were paying 10 cents per-minute with no monthly fee. Most of the long distance calls are between my wife and her girlfriend who lives in Manhattan. This month they talked for 357 minutes, which cost us $35.70 on top of the regular bill.

So I switched to a different plan that has a $2 monthly fee, but charges only 5 cents per minute. If we had that plan in place last month it would have cost only $19.85. That's a savings of $15.85.

2. The local/regional package we had was costing us $44.95 per month and it was full of all sorts of bells and whistles that sounded nice when we signed up, but we now find unnecessary or useless. Call Forwarding, Three-Way Calling, Voicemail...etc.

We picked up a cheap answering machine to replace the voicemail and chose a less expensive package that eliminates most of the 'extras' (though we still get Caller ID and a few others). The new package costs only $34.95, a savings of $10/month.

So we would have saved $25.85 last month if I had acted sooner. The savings will vary depending on how many minutes my wife talks to her girlfriend, but we're guaranteed to save at least $10, with potential to save up to $30 every month.