A Personal Finance Guide

One Bill That Can Ruin Your Holiday Cheer

While recent activity this holiday 2008 season shows a decline in gasoline prices, many households may be facing continued financial stress. Some of the financial stress can be attributed to additional use of personal credit during economic inflation as well as other expenses such as car payments, mortgage, etc. Although motored vehicle gas prices are one of the nation’s biggest expenses another less obvious expense many families additionally face are their cell phone bills.

More and more American consumers are using their cell phones as their primary numbers and as more family plans are offered by wireless providers nationwide, many families are finding themselves still going over budget and into debt with their wireless bills. Much of this problem can be attributed to the consumer and their lack of knowledge on the subject.

Here is some advice to help families avoid overspending on their cell phones, not only for the holiday season, but for all the seasons year round.

Step one: Do not always go for the lowest priced plan.

While going for the lowest priced plan may seem to be the obvious choice to save money on your cell phone bill, many of the less priced plans also come with less minutes. With less minutes in your monthly wireless plan you risk going over your monthly limit which equates to hiked up per minute charges that can run into the hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Beware.

Step two: Be realistic about minute usage.

It is common when entering a new cell phone plan to tell yourself that you will use your phone less to save money and use the majority of minutes on free evenings and weekends. This may be an obtainable goal however, if you have teenagers and are on a family plan, you stand a good chance to not be able to fulfill this goal. Understand your family’s calling behavior and buy a plan that will realistically keep you under your plan range.

Step three: Don’t be fooled by large minute numbers.

Many going into a plan see large blocks of minutes advertised and think they are buying the minute coverage they need. It is up to you to decipher the minute code into a more realistic time table such as hours. This is easily done by dividing the number of minutes by 60. For example: a 1400 minute monthly calling plan may seem like a lot, but on a family plan of 4 individuals, this would only equal to 5 hours worth of calling a month per person. A few half hour conversations during non-free hours can have you well on your way to overage charges and into debt half way into a month.

Step four: Buy an unlimited data/text plan.

This may not seem like an option you would want to add to your current or new plan however if you are on a family plan with teenagers or a preteen, you can be assured that they will be texting and even instant messaging from their phones. Depending on the amount of texting being done, it may make sense to just add on these features to specific phones. Usually at about $5.00 a month per phone for these options you can save a ton of money on per minute Internet charges as well as per text charges.

If you are on a plan, using your current bill may really help you in deciding if an upgrade might be necessary to save on your cell phone bills. In short, be realistic about analyzing your calling habits opposed to attempting to curb your patterns and possibly failing your goals and causing additional debt problems in the future.

This article was written by of TopSavings.Net which offers communication products for both home and business. Cell phones can be compared online by plan, carrier, or phone manufacturer at the site as well as other phone and Internet based products.

Additional products include VoIP, conference calling, business and residential Internet, toll free numbers, local phone service, pay per call advertising, and more. Visit TopSavings.Net for more information.