Home Budgeting

Choose your Phone Company carefully!!

This is one of my favourite areas as it's always been one of the easiest ways to save money. The important thing is that you have to shop around and remember do it yourself. If you speak with company A, their product will always be the most suitable because their sales person wants to make money from you.

In a nutshell though, saving money on your home & mobile telecommunications is easy. Look at your calling patterns, do you call overseas? One great benefit for families is having free calls between say, Mum's & Dad's mobiles. Also discounts from home to Mum & Dad's mobile is a great way to save as well. Generally speaking though, and this is through experience, to save the most and get the most from your services it's better to stick with the one company. If you use a mobile predominantly, do you need to pay $30 a month on line rental. Consider dropping back to the chepeast line rental plan. But look carefully at your calling patterns before you do this. Most phone companies have a cap plan which offers a few hundred or so dollars worth of calls. This is great if you're out and about alot or don't make alot of calls from home.

If you have alot of interstate or international friends / family that you call regularly, have you considered a VOIP service? VOIP stands for Voice Over Internet Protocol and basically means you use your broadband service to make cheap or free calls. The biggest VOIP company in Australia is Engin. They have heaps of different plans available and they're offering free hardware at the moment if you join one of their plans. When considering whether VOIP is right for you, think remember that if your broadband internet plan has a download limit, you may run into trouble as the VOIP phone calls rack up usage on your download / upload limits. If you do not have a limit on your broadband usage though, VOIP may well be an option for you.

The other option here is that if your international / interstate friends also have a computer, you can use software such as Skype or Apple iChat to make free calls over the internet. The simply requires that the person you're calling is sitting in front of their computer with it switched on and logged into the software. I guess this can be a little inconvenient but given that it's free, it's pretty good. This still uses lots of data upload / download though so if you're on a capped usage plan, keep this in mind.

In summary though, with the exception of VOIP it's more likely that you aill achieve greater savings by moving all of your services to the one company, whoever it is. But again, you must shop around as calling rates may be different for different parts of the country depending on who you call. So when you call the phone companies have a list of phone numbers that you most frequently call (such as interstate or other STD calls) to get a clear idea as to what it'll cost.

Choosing a broadband internet company and plan can be just as confusing. Again you should shop around and where possible, you may be best off bundling all you services together. To get a comparison, CLICK HERE. , it'll cost you NOTHING.

If you are after a mobile phone or accessory, try Leading Edge Telecoms.