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Reduce
your long distance phone bill by using prepaid phone cards.
Your telephone service
provider will be very happy to sell you a “discount” phone package that
includes your local and long distance service. Verizon offered that to us
for an extra $20 per month by the time they added in all the taxes and fees
that go along with telephone service these days.
We solved that
financial problem and saved over $200 per year by switching to a local
telephone service plan only. Of course we recently made the next move to
VoIP a few years later and unplugged entirely from the phone system.
The trick to cheap
long distance phone calls is to use a calling card. We still use the phone
when we are traveling. Long distance calls cost us about 3 cents per minute
and usually just a little less. We buy our AT&T calling cards or refill
them at Sams Club for less than $20 for 600 minutes (that’s 10 hours) of
call time with all taxes and fees included.
Here are three things
you should look out for when you buy a long distance telephone calling card.
-
Does the card give
you good long distance rates for the countries you are going to call? The
rates for different countries will vary greatly from card to card.
-
What are the hidden
fees? This is important. A lot of cards sold in “convenience” stores
have either monthly fees, expire over time, or have minimum usage charges
for each call including uncompleted calls. Read the fine print and buy
cards with no or low fees and no expiration of minutes.
-
Can you recharge the
card easily? The AT&T card we use can be filled in the store or over the
phone with a credit card. It’s a few tenths of a cent cheaper to fill it
at the store.
The long access and
code numbers can make dialing a bit of a pain but we use the autodial
feature on our phones to handle that task. The first autodial number is set
to dial the 800 access number and a second autodial number is set to dial
our access code then we just dial the phone number we are calling. We take
the calling card numbers with us when we travel and can call home or
anywhere without paying expensive long distance phone rates at a hotel, pay
phone or on a cell phone. Telephone calling cards are a great way to save
money.
Here are 35 more
great ways to save money. |
