Cutting expenses one cell phone at a time.

DH has been unemployed since April due to medical issues (more on that later) so we are trying to make it on my income. One of the first things I had to do is cut out unnecessary expenses. Unfortunately since we were already living paycheck to paycheck there wasn't a lot to cut from other than deciding which bills I couldn't pay anymore. Already didn't have cable TV, avidly clip coupons, no long distance, no gym or movie club memberships, no magazine subscriptions, etc.

The only luxury I have maintained is having internet service as I do work from home occasionally and with 2 girls in school it is a necessity.  To me this is the one thing I could not live without as it has proved beneficial. I have saved the cost of the service many times over by using internet printed coupons and reading blogs about the best deals at Target, Walgreen's etc.

Fortunately for us our cell phone service with Verizon was up and I made the decision to go prepaid. For me this has worked fabulously as I am very concientious about not using minutes unless necessary. I prefer to email. Unfortunately for DH it hasn't been the best decision. He will actually pick the cell phone up when it's sitting right next to the home phone to make a phone call. It drives me crazy and we have had many fights. The best deal we had so far was with Virgin Mobile for him but this past month he went for service without 2 weeks because I got mad that he blew threw his allotted minutes. :)

I was at Wal-Mart before Christmas and they have a fantastic new Wal-Mart only service called  Straight Talk that is the bomb!  For $30 a month he can get 1,000 minutes of talk, 1,000 texts and 30MB of internet service. If need be we can upgrade to $45 month for unlimited but I think this plan will work fine for him.  I just need to figure out how to activate the internet and he is good to go.  The only downfall to the plan is the minutes expire monthly and do not carry over but we are still spending less than we were with Virgin Mobile.

So far the service has been good. According to the website it's on the Trac-fone network which is nationwide so we hopefully shouldn't have problems.