indigo_rose99

livingdeb  always inspires me to new ways to save money.  I have been planning for a while to call our many service providers and seeing what we can do to reduce the bill.  Hey, from their perspective they should happily choose some money over a near future of no money.

Today I spent about 2 hours typing in the last 1.5 years of cell phone bills into my statistical software package.  How many texts from each phone, how many of each kinds of minutes from each phone.  Some questions I wanted to answer over time:

• How many minutes do we use primetime (weekdays during the daytime) each month?
• How many total minutes do we use, combining primetime + nights + weekends + mobile to mobile?
• Does T text enough to make a text plan (we pay $0.20/text incoming and outgoing) financially worthwhile?

And the answers were... Helpful.  Less than 450.  Usually less than 550, but always less than 1000.  Possibly.

Then I went to our carrier's website and looked for plans.  Two phone lines, one with internet access.  There looked to be some cheaper options than what we are paying.  So... I made the call.  T was mostly concerned about committing to some sort of 2 year plan when he is eying that new Palm pre really hard.  I managed to take $20 off our monthly bill and kept all our current services, no long term commitment.

I think I scared the cell carrier sales person, though.  Most people cannot say things like, "In the past 1.5 years, we have never used more than 450 daytime minutes."  *laugh*  Yeah, having time graphs of the data in front of me really did help.