I wish I could blame this on Richard or on someone else, but I’m a frugal shopper. I’m not horrible about it. I’m not sitting here 12 hours a day cutting out coupons. However, I do love a bargain. I also love to cut down our bills whenever possible. One of our bills seems to be on its way to becoming the bill that will eventually take me down; the phone bill.
Now before you tell me to switch to Vonage or some such service, please keep in mind that VOip requires a broadband connection. Most VOip phone services don’t quote the cost of broadband in their service, so of course they sound ultra cheap. Currently, if I were to get Vonage, I’d have to pay my phone company $44.99 + 3.22 (modem) + taxes and fees (if any) just for the DSL. If I switched to a cable internet, it would be a flat fee of $50.00. Then I add the VOip on top of that. That pretty much brings me into the realm of what I’m currently paying for the phone, local and long distance and the DSL.
What really bugs me is that every. single. damn. time I call the phone company to get my bill into the area where I’m *insert perky, ad voice here* “saving money by bundling my services! I never really am. By the time the next bill shows up, it’s generally $10 over what I was roughly quoted. And, it’s going up and up and up.
Every other month, practically like clockwork, I am calling the phone company to complain, to fix a mis-charge on their part, or just to bang my head virtually because I enjoy pain. I hate the phone company. I can’t chew out the people there because they really can’t help with the way it is. Good god, I made a woman cry once because she absolutely could not estimate the possible fees for a change in service.
I could not understand why she kept hedging on just giving me a guesstimate on the fees (which, you know, always fluctuate) and then she burst into tears and blurted, “Ma’am, I can’t guess, I’ll get fired!” And there were more tears and I felt like a bully.
My parents used to be able to budget our family expenditures. My mom was in charge of that and she was very good at it. We were in our teens before we realized that we were actually poor. Richard and I are constantly trying to budget our expenses, but it never fails that a bill will show up, that we thought we at least had a vague notion of what its dollar amount would be, and it isn’t. “Oh look, honey, the utility company is charging us a street fee of $80 for having put our garbage can in the street last week instead of the sidewalk. Seems it was blocking that big, damn truck of theirs and they couldn’t bother to get out and move it themselves.”
How does budgeting your family finances work out for you? If you’re single, do you budget, or just spend until the next paycheck shows up?
Tags: financial
I’m so glad I live in NZ sometimes… it appears that our bills are easier to understand.
List of phone class with cost, list of services with cost.
Total cost, prompt payment discount.
All done :)
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See. You should switch to Vonage (or some other VoIP). Even though it may be the same cost as you currently pay at least you’ll know that it will be the same cost and it won’t fluctuate and thier won’t be any hidden fees etc. It is what it is. I love my Vonage. It was a bit rough when I first signed up (early apopter) but now there is never a problem and it has some cool features to it that you can’t do on a landline.
I once made it a mission to understand everything on my phone bill. I failed. I know a man who is in upper level management at AT&T and he doesn’t understand his either.
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Funny you should mention this today. I just came back from our power company to sign forms to put us on level pay so that I’ll know each month how much that bill is going to be. That’s the one around here that fluctuates the most. One month $130 and a couple of months later it’s $180 to over $200 for the hot, summer months last this year. So now I’m at $168 a month until the 12th month when they’ll re-evaluate and see if I owe them or they owe me.
When I switched to charter, I got rid of our land line because we also had cell phones. So now we just use the cell phones (same bill every month), and charter, with broadband and the premium package, was still cheaper than DirectTV (for the same service) plus BellSouth (land line and DSL).
Crossing my fingers I won’t owe the power company our life savings when that 12th month rolls around. ;)
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