Live Cheap, Save Big

 From now until June 10th, Skype is offering half-price text messages to the following countries:  Australia, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Estonia, Ireland, Republic of Korea, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom and USA. So get to texting, you still have 4 days left to save! If you’re not familiar with Skypeout, check out foXnoMad to find out how it works.

Next time you need to make a short international call, consider using a text message instead. If you make a 10-second phone call, a lot of cell phone companies will charge you for the full minute. If you’re making the call while overseas the rates will be even higher as you will be paying roaming charges as well. When I was in Canada, I made several extremely short phone calls and for each call I was charged over $0.80 which is the international rate for a full minute while roaming. I didn’t know that Cingular’s international text message rates were significantly cheaper than making a call. Skypeout is also a good money-saving alternative if you don’t want to get destroyed on international calling and text message rates.

Cell phone carriers are constantly changing their terms and conditions so they can make the most money from their customers. And if you try to cancel your contract because of this, they force you to pay an early termination fee which can be upwards of a couple hundred dollars. The Consumerist writes:

Here’s a roundup of all the contract clauses regarding “materially adverse changes” for all the major cellphone carriers. When they starting charging new fees or raise the price of a service, you can use this section to argue that you need to be let out of contract without early termination fee….

The article reviews the “materially adverse clauses” for Sprint/Nextel, T-Mobile, Verizon and Cingular. Even if you don’t end up cancelling your contract, you should remove the roadside assistance fee if you’re a Cingular customer. Or you could earn rollover minutes as a new Cingular customer by signing up for the 7pm plan and then cancelling it after a month. To save money, analyze your phone needs and adjust your rate plan.

Those of you who may be thinking of signing up with a new Cingular contract (should  always go with the cheapest rate plan) and make sure you add the $7.99 7pm free nights and weekends feature. Do this only for the first month, then remove the feature at the end of that first 30 days.

This technique will help you to quickly rack up rollover minutes so that you’ll never go over during the life of your contact. You’ll end up with a net positive number of minutes that you can maintain and grow over 2 years. Changing features does not require a contract renewal. Also, make sure you get rid of the $3 roadside assistance fee they tack on with out asking.

I recently adjusted my cell phone rate plan with Cingular and reduced my bill by about $15-$20 a month, which will end up saving me $180-$240 on the year. The first thing I did was check my last couple of bills to see how many minutes I was actually using. I’m not a big talker so I was well under the monthly allowance and had over 4000 rollover minutes. Text message charges were racking up at 10 cents apiece, putting my monthly bill in the $65-$70 range. I also noticed a mystery $2.99 fee on my bill so I called customer service to find out what it was. It turned out to the unauthorized roadside assistance fee I wrote about recently. After removing that feature, which I never signed up for, I downgraded to the $39.99 monthly plan and added a $4.99 text message plan which gives me 200 messages per month. My last 3 bills have been under $50 and I have not changed the way I use my cell phone. So save a couple bills and see for yourself, why pay an outrageous fee for a monthly plan with minutes and features you don’t use?

Frucall is a free service that lets you compare prices via text message as you shop. You can text the product and price to Frucall and they will text you back to let you know if you can get the product cheaper, perhaps in another part of the mall you’re in.

For SMS savvy users, Frucall Text is the simplest and fastest way to access and compare “online” prices of products while they are out shopping making buying decisions. Frucall Text works on all phones and is a convenient and accurate way to compare the best prices from major online merchants.

Frucall [via Consumerist] is still in beta and may be a bit buggy, but sounds worthwhile. To save a bit more on text messages, look up the prices online and use Skype to text the prices for comparison.

Those of you who use Skype Out to save money on your international phone calls already know that you can send SMS (text) messages too. (Usually for less than a penny per message to most cell phones around the world.) Skype has announced a 50% discount to Austria, Australia, Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Russia, Taiwan, Thailand and the US until May 8. Get those keyboards rolling!

If you cringe every time you pick up your land line to tell your French honey “je t’aime” get some information on Skype, a free download.