MY GOD CELL PHONES ARE EXPENSIVE! I got to the point where I was paying $107 per month for my cell phone bill and $85 a month for my wife’s cell phone bill. I really got fed up with these prices. I was able to save around $40 a month. So I want to give you some tips on how to save money on your cell phone bill and how to bring the cost down so you’re not paying a million dollars a month on your cell phone bill.

First of all, this was the gist of my previous cell phone plan and costs:

1. I have Verizon.
2. I use a Blackberry, which means I had to have an unlimited text plan.
3. I had 900 minutes a month.
4. I had unlimited texting.
5. I had insurance on my phone.

My usage goes like this:

1. I text a hell of a lot.
2. I call a couple people most frequently and talk to them an hour each week.
3. I use data a lot.

The basis for my savings is using Google Voice to optimize my cell phone billing plan.

Google Voice gives you one phone number for people to call so you can consolidate all of your phone numbers(work, home, cell, etc). This has the cost benefit of having a cell call going to your home phone or desk phone at work. If you’re not using cell minutes for those calls, you can reduce your cell minutes and decrease your cost.

The next thing is that you can send text messages through Google Voice. You go to their website and send SMS messages through their website. OR, you can download the Google Voice app for Blackberry. This allows you to send SMS messages from your Blackberry. It’s not quite integrated into the Blackberry framework at this point, BUT it’s available and I have started using this for 100% of my texting. Guess what that means. I TEXT FOR FREE! So I took texting off of my cell plan. That’s $20 savings.

Also, since I use Google Voice, I dial a single number to make phone calls and all incoming phone calls look like they come from a single number. So I go to my account maintenance page, setup Friends and Family to have my Google Voice number for incoming calls and the number I call for outgoing calls(different for some reason). Suddenly all of those calls aren’t counted toward my minute usage.

After talking to the Verizon representatives for a while, I found I could reduce my cell minutes from 900 minutes to 450 minutes. Unfortunately, I lost Friends and Family by doing that, BUT the Verizon folks assured me that I still haven’t been using 450 minutes. So I’m going to see how that goes.

On top of that, I’m getting a 20% discount from my employer. So that’s also helpful. Check with your company to see if you can get a discount on ANY cell provider. Maybe you need to switch to save some dough.

All in all, I’ve saved over $60 on my cell phone bill(in theory, I haven’t gotten my cell phone bill after doing this). So we shall see what happens and I’ll report back on the results.

There’s a large waiting list to get in with Google Voice, but it seems to have saved me a significant amount of money so far.

Leave a comment with your own cell phone bill reducing strategies!

-MG