Recently, we made a few changes to our utilities to bring down our bill.
Telephone:
We had a VOIP land-line with Vonage through we used to make a lot of calls to India, where our family lives. However, my Vonage bill was coming up to $43-$44 per month and it seemed excessive to us. So we looked into other options.
One of my cousins suggested Ooma. Ooma is also a VOIP phone which is similar to Vonage except that there's a one-time charge of $149.99 for the modem and setup system. There's also a $39.99 charge for porting your existing number. Other than this, there's an approximately $3.50 charge per month which is basically taxes.
For international calls to India, we decided to try out Skype subscription for international calls which comes to about 800 minutes per month for $8.99. If we exceed that, for extra minutes, it's about 1.5c per minute.
The math works out like this. For a year with Ooma & Skype, per month we would pay
(149.99 + $29.99) / 12
+ 3.50
+ $8.99
= $28.32
This gives us a savings of $15.68 per month.
Over the course of a year, this has saved us ($15.68*12) = $188 approximately
Internet:
My husband and I both occasionally work from home. And we watch Indian TV channels through the internet. So, good quality internet is a must. We used to have TDS Telecom which provided us with 5 Mbps DSL service. Initially, this was quite cheap for us but with time, this had gotten very expensive and even with a customer loyalty discount, we were paying close to $60 per month.
We decided to explore other options and decided to switch to Charter Internet from TDS.
With this switch, we will not be paying $40 approximately for 30 Mbps internet.
Over the course of a year, we will be saving ($20*12) = $240
Overall savings for the year: $188 + $240 = $428