How to Save $150 on Your Cell Phone Bill

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My wife and I have been on a quest lately to try and cut down our spending by questioning all of our monthly bills. From grocery expenses to monthly utility costs … we are trying to pinch every last penny we can.

Of course, there are certain things we are not interested in cutting back on … like healthy foods. Eating healthy food is very important to our family. And if that means spending a little more on organic, whole foods … then that is worth the extra expense to us.

On the other hand, certain things like cable just aren’t important. So we have been cutting those types of expenses that just don’t add much value to our lives.

And in some cases, we look for opportunities to save money on expenses we don’t want to completely cut … but think there may be ways to still save.

For example, we currently have Verizon Wireless for our cell phone provider. At this time, we are not completely ready to give up our cell phones. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t still trying to save on our plans.

Note – We currently have one Republic Wireless phone that our teenage son uses. A few years back we decided to give Republic Wireless a try to see if the costs savings was worth it. So far, it has been okay for our son … but we are still hesitant to completely switch over.

The good news is that we were able to figure out a way to save about $150 a year on our Verizon cell phones that took 5 minutes.

Verizon Wireless – Employee Discount Program

I wished I would have known about this sooner! Not sure why I never came across it before, but I recently read an article on saving money on cell phone bills.

One of the tips I read for Verizon Wireless (which is who we have), was to register for an employee discount. While I wasn’t sure if my current employer was part of the discount program, I figured it was worth a try.

The process was simple and took less than 5 minutes to complete. Basically, after going to the Discounts by Verizon Wireless link and signing in … I was asked to provide my work email address. A verification email was sent to this email address where I clicked a link to verify my discount.

Then I waited a couple days, logged back into my account, and to my surprise saw an updated bill for the upcoming month. I wasn’t expecting all that much to be honest … but was happy to see a 20% discount applied to my plan … which was a $12 a month ambien savings!

Actually, after taxes and other charges, the new monthly savings comes out to $12.44!

$60 plan less 20% = $48 new plan amount!

That comes out to an annual savings of just under $150 for something that took me 5 minutes. Now I am just wondering why I didn’t know about this sooner. I could have saved close to $1,000 in the 6+ years I have been working for my employer.

Total Annual Savings = $149.28

Putting the Savings into a “Hustle Account”

So what are we going to do with this extra savings? Eventually, we will invest this extra money … but putting $12.44 to work in the market each month isn’t the best option … although it is possible through our Robinhood account.

Instead, we are going to transfer our $12.44 a month savings into a checking account, which we have named our “Hustle Account”. This is an older online checking account we opened up a few years ago, that has a balance of $41.06.

Our plan is to automatically transfer $12.44 from our main checking account into our hustle account each month starting in November.

We won’t just stop there … this hustle account will be used to collect any monthly savings we can identify … in addition to saving on our cell phone bill.

The account will also be used to collect money we earn from any side hustle that comes along in the future. For example, we have a garage sale coming up in a couple weeks … so any money we earn from that will automatically go into this account.

We will start tracking our hustle account balance as of October 1, 2018.

Hustle Account Balance (October 1, 2017) = $41.06

Funding our IRA Accounts

Eventually, when this account hits a certain threshold, we will transfer money out into helping fund our IRA accounts. My wife and I have not been doing a very good job funding our IRA’s, so in 2018 that is a goal. And this hustle account will help us get there.

Hopefully, we can “hustle” enough to at least fund my wife’s IRA … which will be $5,500 in 2018. Then, if we can keep it going, we will try and fund my IRA … another $5,500.

Note – Funding our IRA’s is on top of the other investments we are making to our Money Sprout Index. We have no plans to slow down the investments we are making to our dividend income portfolio.

Have you been able to save money through employer discounts on bills like cell phones? What do you end up doing with your savings?

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