When you think of prepaid cell phones, what do you think of? If you’ve watched The Wire on HBO, a gritty drama about life in Baltimore, you associate them with drug dealers. If you were a fan of the Sopranos, you knew they were good for avoiding wiretaps. If you haven’t seen either, chances are you don’t associate them with anything. Most people don’t use prepaid cell phones because we naturally think to a nice buffet-type minute plan with a major carrier.

For our vacation to Europe, we used a pay as you go phone. We couldn’t use our own phones since we didn’t have compatible technology but our friend lent us her old phone. We went to a local Orange store (a pay as you go service company, bought a Sim card, and loaded it up with some minutes.

The cost of the chip? £0.

We put £5 on the phone and we now had cell service without a commitment, without any huge up front payments, and we only pay for the minutes we needed.

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Calling family and friends overseas is very affordable and very easy, if done correctly. In this article I am going to reveal three affordable international long distance calling options to the old expensive standby, direct dialing. I’ve been doing a lot of research in this for my own needs so I hope you find this article valuable. Each option has the potential to save you more and more money, though sometimes you have to sacrifice a bit of convenience. Naturally, it’s always easiest to pick up the phone can call directly, instead of using a phone card, but only one of those two options is used by millions of people every week at a savings of up to 95% on every international phone call.

Why is this post focused on international long distance calls? Today, very few people have to pay extra for a domestic long distance call that there really is no incremental cost for a domestic long distance phone call. Cell phones charge by the minute, with no consideration of local or long distance. For that reason, we’ve ignored the domestic long distance calls.

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Editor’s Note: I’ve been looking at a lot of office productivity tools lately, like internet faxing, and I knew one of the guys associated with Toktumi, one of the leaders in the home office PBX space. Since I’m on vacation, I asked him to write up a little something about how virtual office tools can help a small business, bribing him with the opportunity to talk about his company.

David Pogue of the New York Times recently revealed his productivity secrets. The very first item he credits: “I work at home. That’s two, three or four hours more work time each day that I don’t spend commuting.” Oftentimes, the appeal of limiting wasted commute hours is offset by the fear of losing access to the work tools available at the office.

Fortunately, as collaboration technologies improve, broadband proliferates, and the country goes greener, working at home will become more popular. For many companies, particularly those that employ knowledge workers, it makes little sense to spend money renting an office and requiring employees to commute every day. When you add in gas, parking, bus or train fares, and wasted hours commuting for little added benefit, the choice becomes easier.

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I’ve had a Palm Treo for almost two years and one of the nice things about having a smartphone is that it gives me the ability to go online whenever I have cell service. It’s saved my butt on more than one occasion.

With the internet at my fingertips, one thing I’ve done more often is check my banking information through the phone’s web browser. It’s a quick way to see if checks have cleared without calling the bank and navigating the painful IVR systems. However, I’ve always done this without much concern for security.

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We have a lot of subscriptions in our household. We pay to subscribe to several magazines (Real Simple, Wired, Portfolio). We are members of our local gym and we have Netflix. We both have cell phones (hers is through her company) and we both have E-ZPasses in our cars. All together we probably have at least a dozen “monthly” services that we pay money for, all of which made sense at the time we subscribed. As our needs and our routines change, some of those services may not longer make much sense.

The idea of subscription optimization and per use cost is very simple. For a month, track how often you use a subscription and calculate the per use cost. If you pay $60 a month for a gym membership and go thirty times a month, that’s a per use cost of $2. Then compare it with the a la carte cost, or how much it would cost if you weren’t a member but still used the service. If it’s cheaper to go a la carte, cancel the subscription.

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The economic malaise has probably had an effect on your life, I know it has had one on mine. However, as bad as you think your personal prospects are, it’s worse for companies that have to make payroll, rent, and debt obligations. At the end of the day, you have to take care of you and your own, which is why I recommend that you periodically shop around and use that information to strong arm your way to a better deal on the services you already buy.

Don’t feel badly about using your most powerful a weapon, the power of choice, to negotiate a better deal. When you pay $60 or $80 or $100 a month for cable television, you’re not getting $60 or $80 or $100 worth of service. You’re getting something the company is selling to someone else for $30 a month. They will charge whatever the market will bear and it’s up to you, the consumer, to push back and tell them that their price is too high. At the end of the day, they would rather you spend $5 a month than quit and spend $0.

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The Consumerist’s Chris Walters commented about a Slate article in which they found that landlines were now considered a luxury expense. With rising costs in everything else, land-lines were becoming useless and cut from the monthly budget. In the Slate article, writer Daniel Gross pinged the under-30 crowd at the offices of Slate and Newsweek and discovered that very few had home phones at all. Those who did used Skype.

Since college, I’ve never had a land-line telephone. In fact, I still have the 412 Pittsburgh cell phone number I had when I was in college. Number portability enabled me to migrate that number across four carriers (six if you count the AT&T Wireless to Cingular to AT&T Wireless merger-acquisition-spin-off merry-go-round) in five years. Landlines are dinosaurs on a mammalian planet. I don’t know how much a land-line costs nowadays but even the ubiquitous “triple play for $100″ seems like you’re overpaying for the telephone.

However, I can think of three situations where you’d want (or be forced to have) a land-line:

Children. While your cell phone does get 911 service, hitting 9-1-1 and then the green Send or green phone button is one button more than the traditional land-line. This is, of course, worst case scenario and not particularly strong justification for paying $20/month but it’s certainly a consideration for some parents. This is also only a consideration for very young children, the age at which they shouldn’t and wouldn’t be left home alone anyway, so you’re really talking about scenarios in which the parents are incapacitated. Either way, I know that some parents have justified having a land-line for this very reason.

Security systems. Most security systems need a telephone line if you want it to communicate with the central station. Some newer systems can take advantage of wireless networks but most still rely on the old land-line. A land-line is one of the hidden costs of getting a security system, if you’re sold on or required to have central monitoring.

DSL. DSL is a digital subscriber line and it’s internet service across the phone system. Unless your provider offers naked DSL or dryloop DSL, you’ll be required to have phone service to get DSL.

Outside of those three cases, I don’t see the point of a land-line. Anyone have a land-line anymore?

(Photo: clemson)

Sorry Cingular/AT&T/AT&T Wireless/whatever your name is now, but I’ve finally cut the cord with you guys after several years of service as my phone was finally dying and you all refused to give me a new phone (or even a discount off a phone). In fact, when I called, I was told that any change to my account would require me to 1) pay more because I was on a cheap legacy rate, and, 2) sign up for a new contract (in return for nothing). So instead of doing something stupid and unreasonable like that, I signed up for a Sprint SERO (Sprint Employee Referral Offer) plan thanks to some advice from my good friend and yours, Nickel.

What did I get? The fancy Treo 755p PDA smartphone through the SERO website, which set me back $249.99. Now, you can get it through Amazon for $69.99 after rebate but there’s a reason why I didn’t go that route.

Through the SERO plan, I was able to get 500 anytime minutes with unlimited text messaging and data for $30/mo. I also stacked on a coupon code URANG for a $50 statement credit. The base plan of 450 minutes a month through Amazon costs $39.99 a month plus you are required to get Power Vision Access Pack (at a minimum) for $15/mo. Over the course of a two year contract, the difference in monthly costs far exceeds the equipment cost. Oh yeah, that doesn’t include the activation fee through Amazon of $36.

Oh, to make things sweeter, Sprint wanted me to give them a call about my order and they were going to compensate me $25 in statement credits just for my time. The call was for me to verify some credit information and took about ten minutes.

If you’re looking to get a new phone, seriously check out the Sprint SERO site because it’s is crazy cheap. You can use savings@sprintemi.com to get access. Now we just await the new phone.

Eight people with more money than brains will soon be the new owner of a cell phone that costs more than my house. French jeweler Boucheron designed a $310,000 cell phone called the Signature Cobra and Vertu is only making 8 of them. The phone has a pear-cut diamond, a round white diamond, two emerald eyes, and four hundred and thirty nine rubies. If you can’t afford to spend three hundred large on a cell phone, there’s a $115,000 version, called the Python, but only twenty-six of those will be made.

Photo courtesy of CNN.

When number portability became widespread and available to all, I’ve been switching cell phone carriers every year so I can get a new free cell phone, maybe some cash back, and the joy of another one year contract. My first cell phone carrier was Sprint, my second was T-Mobile, and my current, and longest running carrier, is AT&T Wireless/Cingular. Of the three, T-Mobile had the best customer service (drop call credits!), Sprint had the best coverage, and AT&T Wireless has the worst customer service ever. But… it’s been over a year so I’m scouring the Amazon.com Free After Rebate plans for a hot deal. The only downside though is the number portability problem with Amazon.com deals for some carriers.

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