Things You'll Need:
- An interest in saving money
- A willingness to make some changes
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Step 1
Evaluate the terms of your current plan. How many minutes have you been using, on average? How many text messages are you sending? Are there other fees (say, for online access) that you could eliminate?
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Step 2
If you think you can reduce your talk-time to 200 minutes a month or less, you might find better value(and more freedom) in the realm of prepaid service plans, rather than month-to-month billing. For example, T-Mobile offers 1000 -Pay-As-You-Go- anytime minutes for 100 dollars, prepaid (as of March 2009). At 200 minutes a month, you'd be paying a mere $20 a month (and you could save even more by talking less). The phones and refill cards are available online or at major retail stores. You pay no unexpected fees and receive no bills. When your balance gets low, you simply purchase a refill on the phone itself or find a refill card at a retailer.
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Step 3
Don't be afraid to get out of your contract. Yes, you might face a penalty of $100-200 dollars, which is painful. But do the math: if you could save $50 a month by changing your cell-habits, in 3 or 4 months you would have made up the difference of that penalty, and from there, you'd save $600 a year. In the future, when times get better, you can always return to your preferred plan.
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Step 4
If you want to reduce the cost of a family phone plan, you could require that your children earn money outside the home to pay their fair share. While freeing up some cash in your family budget, this step might also help build valuable character qualities in your kids. It's a win-win. (Another idea: pick up a prepaid phone (like the T-Mobile example) as a gift to your teen, then make it his/her responsibility to purchase the refill cards.)
