This is a bit off topic...but I went to Verizon the other night with Runnin' Buddy and her son to see about reducing our phone bills.
I'm due for a $100 discount upgrade next month and am trying to reduce my bill....which is $225 a month....
That's for a Treo, with internet access, unlimited minutes and messages, and an "air card" which is $62 of it.
Other half and son are on a "Friends and Family", and that bill is pretty reasonable since they just reworked it last week.
We also have 2 land lines and DSL with AT&T that is $250 a month.
Runnin Buddy and her husband have the same thing and are paying the same amount....so I know it's not just us.
Anyhow.....she is adding her son (23 and in college at MTSU) on to theirs as Friends and Family. It will reduce his bill about $50 a month. He has an air card (for his laptop) that they are going to keep on a separate bill.
There is no age limit or anything else, if you want to add someone onto Friends and Family, and everyone has a separate line....just minutes and messages can not be exceeded as a total of all lines. (My boys have a specified amount of minutes, but unlimited messages. One mostly talks, the other mostly messages). Each additional person is only $9.95 a month.
Then we got to the house phones...
We can cancel one land line, Verizon will take that number, and put it on a separate line on the F & F plan for $9.95/month!
Our other land line is fax/business, so we will keep it.
But we can get another air card, that will work on up to 5 different computers, for $62 a month.....which is $20 less than the DSL that is no where near as fast. The only catch is that you can only be "on line" on one computer at a time.
I can add my air card software to my PC and use it. The other half can use the new one, and son is usually on at random times so he can go on the other half's air card.
This would make our land line about $50/month max....and only add $62 to the other half's bill...unless he does the land line as another F & F line.
Still haven't figured out how mine cell is going to get reduced, except to take off internet access, which I will probably do as I can't get my emails on my Treo ...which is why I got it in the first place
I will know more next month when I go talk with the guy at Verizon.
I really liked this guy....we were there a half hour after closing while he explained all this to us....and helped to figure out how to save us money!
There are probably a whole bunch of you that already know all this stuff....but maybe there's a few, like me, who don't know.
