These People Managed to Shave a Collective $395 off Their Monthly Bills

All of your bills really add up, don’t they?

You pay for cell phone service. You’ve got cable and/or internet (gotta stay connected). Of course there’s car insurance. Then the power bill shows up every month like a bad penny.

Month after month after month. It never ends. After you pay all those bills, it’s no wonder you have no money left.

You may think you’re stuck paying through the nose, but you’re not. There are ways you can change things up and cut your costs.

To inspire you, we found four people who have found innovative and surprisingly easy ways to shave money off of all those bills.

Portland Man Saves $120 a Month on Cell Phone Service

With a wife and two kids to support, Zak Wilson is a guy who has to stick to a budget.

But when it came to cell phone service, he could never find the sweet spot — reliable service he could afford. Every carrier he tried was either too pricy or too glitchy.

Wilson got frustrated with Verizon Wireless because it cost so much. He was paying around $180 a month for cell service for him and his wife.

So he switched to a discount carrier — and his savings were extreme

“Now, for both phones, we’re paying maybe 60 bucks,” says Wilson, a 43-year-old salesman and entrepreneur who lives near Portland, Oregon.

There are several of them out there, but one we like is US Mobile, where the average user’s monthly phone bill is $15. This can save folks on average more than $440 a year.

US Mobile buys wireless service wholesale from the big wireless carriers and resells it to you. It operates on two of the largest cellular LTE networks — T-Mobile and Verizon (heard of them?) — and covers more than 320 million Americans.

Indiana Man Lowers His Bills by $1,265.42 a Year With This Tool

William Ellis, of Ellettsville, Indiana, needed to negotiate his Dish, Comcast and Sprint bills, and thought there was nothing to lose by trying a bill-negotiation app.

And he was right. He lowered his bills by:

• $385.20 a year on Dish
• $800.18 a year on Comcast
• $80.04 a year on Sprint

Ellis’ bills were reduced by a total of $1,265.42 per year — or about $105 a month. 

Want to try negotiating your bills?

Use Truebill, an app that’ll help you identify and cancel unwanted subscriptions. We’re not just talking your cable bill, either. It’ll also negotiate your internet and cell phone bills.

Simply connect your bank account to Truebill (It uses bank-level security!), and it will review your recurring payments. Find any subscriptions you don’t need anymore, and click to cancel them through the app. The more accounts you connect, the more likely you are to find those sneaky subscriptions.

When Truebill successfully negotiates on your behalf, it keeps an upfront fee equal to 40% of your first year of savings, and you keep the rest.

Just sign up for Truebill for free and let the app get to the bottom of it for you.

Texas Man Knocks $360 Off His Yearly Car Insurance Rate

Until Artie Januario’s recent cross-country move, he’d never considered shopping around for car insurance.

When he lived in Boston, one of his best friends was his insurance agent, so he just went with it. At the time, the 32-year-old paid about $95 a month through Liberty Mutual.

But then he moved to Austin, Texas, where he had to re-register his car, get a new license, secure new car insurance — all that jazz.

He decided he had nothing to lose and compared insurance quotes — and managed to knock off about $30 a month in a state that, on average, has higher insurance rates than the one he’d moved from.

If you want to knock off up to $715 a year from your car insurance policy, try using a digital marketplace called SmartFinancial, and you could be getting rates as low as $22 a month — and saving yourself more than $700 a year.

It takes one minute to get quotes from multiple insurers, so you can see all the best rates side-by-side. Yep — in just one minute you could save yourself $715 this year. That’s some major cash back in your pocket.

So if you haven’t checked car insurance rates in a while, see how much you can save with a new policy.

 

Let’s Tally It Up

So we’ve got a guy in Portland who’s saving himself $120 a month on his cell phone bill with Twigby. We’ve got an Indiana man who’s using Truebill to save himself $105 a month on Dish, Comcast and Sprint.

A Texas man knocked $30 off his monthly car insurance bill with The Zebra.

That adds up to $395 a month, collectively.

All you have to do is make the first move. You’ve got nothing to lose!

Mike Brassfield ([email protected]) is a senior writer at The Penny Hoarder. He’s got bills.