I’m happy to announce the return of my Frugal Friday series. I want to share things that I’m doing to cut my home expenses and inspire you to find new ways to economize!
I also think it’s important to note that how a person or family spends money is a very personal decision. What I think is a frivolous expense you may think is essential and vice versa. I pay for cable TV, internet and phone but I color and cut my own hair. I also am fully aware that what is cutting back and sacrificing for me is nothing compared to what others have done out of pure thriftiness or necessity.
Our new house is in the foothills and cell phone reception is not good here. I had to change carriers from T-Mobile to AT&T to have any service at all.
What I didn’t know was that AT&T only had one rate for texting: $20 per month. Yikes! I had been so happy with 300 texts a month for $5 with T-Mobile.
I decided that it wasn’t worth $20 so I didn’t buy the texting plan to go with my new phone. After several inconvenient months of having a phone without texting I saw a commercial advertising a free texting app through my cable phone service! This was the perfect solution for me. We were already subscribers to Comcast cable Xfinity plan which includes cable, internet and phone.
PROS: The free app allows me to send and receive text messages on my cell phone using my home phone number. It’s saved me $240 so far and counting! I occasionally have friends and family who forget and text me at my cell number and those get charged at $0.20 each, but that’s fine. I just text them back through my app and continue the conversation over there.
CONS: The only downside is that for now, the Comcast Xfinity app does not support multimedia messaging. So I can’t text pictures or video. I can always get around that by emailing a photo or video because anyone I’d be texting has a smartphone and gets email on it anyway. The other caveat to know is that since it uses your home phone number, only one person in your household can use this app.
If you have Comcast and would like to look into the details you can do so here.
So, would you consider dropping your text plan and saving $20 a month if your cable company offered this? Let me know in the comments!