Cell Phones and Saving Money

So we decided to cancel our Verizon cell phone service. It got really expensive, and we don't use up the 400 free minutes every month. I bought a T-Mobile prepaid phone today for $59.00 online. They are going to give me $25.00 minutes free and a $30.00 mail-in rebate. So really all I've spent is $5.00. I love doing this online, so quick and easy! I went through the T-Mobile website and got to keep my same number. They approved me via Chat which was wonderful as well.

I'm so glad to be rid of the 2 year contract and big bill every month. I compared prepaid phone services and browsed the intenet for reviews. T-Mobile seems like the best for us - no roaming or other extra fees. The best deal for minutes is the $100.00 refill card as it's .10 a minute plus a 15% bonus on refills, or something like that. The minutes roll over as long as you top them off before they expire which is one year. Everytime you buy more mintues, your year begins over. We had to pay a penalty with Verizon, but we'll break even in about 4 months if I don't use the cell much. We should be saving $25.00 or more a month with the cell phone change.

I found two places for cheaper minutes:

Phoneshark.com

cheapphonecards.com

I'd love to cut out a few other expenses. Our hard line phone service is $30.00 a month, and our cable bill is $10.00 a month. I thought about getting rabbit ears for the televisions to save on the $10.00 monthly charge, but it's hardly worth it. By 2009 it won't matter; I'll have to have cable or get nothing because television stations will no longer be transmitting analog signals. My choices after 2009 would be to buy converter boxes for all the televisions, or pay for them to reinstate my cable service. If I had HDTV sets I could get free stations, but those sets are still very pricey.

I pay $48.95 for my ISP, hard line telephone and cable. I guess that's not so bad. We'll be working on saving on the water bill; ds keeps leaving on the water in the tub. He forgets to turn the handle all the way, and sometimes it trickles for hours before I notice it!

We also seem to have mounds of laundry. Most of the clothes ds wears aren't dirty, so I need to go through them more carefully before I wash them. I'm going to have dh put up a laundry line inside the garage, so that I can line dry clothes. Someday we'll get one of those smart dryers with a moisture sensor which shuts off when the clothes are dry.