I just wanted to remind all of you to check over all of your monthly bills before paying them! Up until recently I used to sit down and write all of my bills out without actually looking them over in detail, (I know, I know, I should know better than that! )
With my husband and I deciding recently that I would quit my job in the end of August, I have been trying to live more frugally and conciouslly with our money.
Anyway, I was just looking over my phone/internet bill and realized that the bill seemed too high. Not knowing exactly what the reason was, I decided to call and see if it all seemed correct. Sure enough, I had been over charged by almost $22.00!!!! WOW! And, just to think, a couple of months ago, I would've just figured it was a big month in long distance calls and paid the bill without questioning it! I know that $22 might not be a lot of money, but, hey, a penny saved is a penny earned, right? :happy dance:
Just on a side note: Has anyone ever "down-graded" their cell phone plans? My husband and I currently pay about $76/month (total, with taxes and everything) through Cingular for 450 Minutes/mo. We have a lot of rollover minutes left each month, so I wanted to "down-grade" to a cheaper plan. Our contract is up in another two weeks, so I wanted to see if there are any plans that you know of that would be cheaper??
Thanks

That's great! I always look over my bills.
My dh and I recently down graded our cell phones. We both have Cingular, as do many of our family and friends. So we got the lowest package we could get. We can talk mobile to mobile with all other cingular costomers and it won't take away your minutes.

We switched a couple years to Virgin Wireless (from paying around $75-80/month with Verizon). It is prepaid, so we bought our phones (the cheapest models they had, since we use them so rarely we didn't need anything fancy), and pay $40 every three months ($20/phone) for I believe 20 minutes/phone. We RARELY use our phones, and now have over 100 minutes on each phone. The minutes don't expire, but you have to renew with at least $20 every 3 months to keep the account active. It was the cheapest thing that I could find when I was looking to downgrade. We get decent service for being in a pretty rural area (we got pretty much no service with Verizon) -- I think that Virgin is part of the Sprint network.

__________________
Erin, aka Quentinsmommy, mom to Quentin (1/03) and Ian (1/06)

I recently downgrdaed our cell phone plan with Verizon... we have 3 phones, 2100 minutes with a few extras - our monthly bill was $175. We were not using more than 700-800 a month so I had the plan dropped down. I think it will save me $20 a month.

I "downgraded" by switching to TMobile prepaid. For $100 I get like 1000 min. and it expires in 1 year from purchase. I was paying 80/mo with Cingulair. I just recharged my TMobile for the first time since Dec. so 100/6 is less than 20 a month. Saves me 60 a month. If I was really good, I would use it less, but a girl has got to talk.

c

Also, check your explaination of benefits from your insurance company. I found out that they paid a bill that I had already paid. The doctors office was only going to refund me the credit amount of $308.40. (The bill was $500 of which I paid the full amount. The insurance company paid $308.40. My subscriber responsibility was $34.60.) That is a $157 difference that they would have gotten away with if I did not catch it.

I glanced at my home phone bill the other day and noticed I'm being charged $5 a month for long distance. We NEVER use long distance and I didn't think we had it at all. I called them and apparently we are on an old, discontinued plan and she said I could change the $5 to $2 and still have the same long distance plan, or drop it all together. If we drop it all together we can still use long distance if we need to, we just won't know the rate etc until we get the bill.

While talking to her I was looking online and noticed their monthly plan was about $10 cheaper then we'd been paying. (i think that was the amount)

Anyway, long story short, I switched to the cheaper plan, now have more features and saved (i think) $15 a month!!! All because our plan (that was only 2 years old) was discontinued and outdated!