Reducing Bills Frustrations

So the Keefer household is in the middle of tightening our belts as the baby's due date gets closer and closer (albeit we're still at T-Minus 4.5 months to go, but still) and Amanda starts seeking a new job, but we've come up against some annoying roadblocks on reducing bills with a few of our providers:

First, a call to AT&T Wireless was a waste of cell minutes. Granted, we have plenty to waste, which is why I called in the first place. We do their Family plan, with Amanda and I sharing minutes, along with my parents, who on a good month use 45 minutes collectively, with many of those being mobile-to-mobile. With rare exception, we've always got a ton of minutes leftover, rolling a bunch over into the rollover bucket. My call to them was for them to assist us in lowering our rate plan to something more in line with our usage. Well, there isn't such a plan. We're stuck with what we got. Anything cheaper isn't a family plan, meaning the advantages of sharing minutes go away, plus they raise the extra line feeds. What a waste.

The next call was to Time Warner Cable, who I have a love/hate relationship, minus the love. There's no way unless things go way south that we're going to remove the RoadRunner service, but I was looking for a way to reduce the cable bill. I took off the HD package, which will save a couple bucks, but without losing a ton of channels and all our HD (and honestly not saving much), we're also stuck at our current bill. This will never happen, but I would love to just pay for the HD channels. All we watch are the HD channels. Everything else is never touched in our household, save a rare SD view in the den. DirecTV, we miss you.

The other place I thought we could save some cash was bundling Time Warner's digital phone. Yeah, not so much. We currently have Vonage. While we don't have their unlimited plan, we don't need that amount (see the bit about AT&T Wireless above). We currently pay just over $20 a month with Vonage. Even with discounts from having RoadRunner and digital cable. For the same amount ($19.95), TIme Warner only offers local phone calls. Plus, voicemail is an additional per/month charge. Plus, I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure. We'll stick to Vonage, thank you very much.

It's tough finding more ways to reduce bills. Paying off my Tarmac Expert in a few months will help for sure, and nearly eliminating eating out will also be beneficial to both the wallet and waistline.