Ditch those money-sucking bills

By Liz Pulliam Weston

I'm still embarrassed about this.

A few years ago, when my daughter was a toddler, I flipped on the kitchen light and saw the bug that no mother ever wants to see scuttling across the floor: a cockroach.

I called a national pest-control company in barely restrained panic. The company sent out a technician the next day to obliterate the wee beastie and all of its unsanitary kin. I paid the bill, thanked the technician profusely and thought that was that.

Three months later, I got another bill from this company for "quarterly service." Ongoing treatment, the pest killers assured me, would prevent a recurrence. So I paid that bill, and the next, and the next, telling myself that $83 a quarter was a small price to pay for a roach-free home.

I paid at least five bills before it dawned on me that I'd seen one bug in the seven years we'd lived in the house. I didn't have a bug problem -- I'd had one, and it had been fixed. What I didn't have was the $400-plus I'd transferred to the bug company's account. I finally canceled the service, and I haven't seen a cockroach since.

I have one consolation: I'm not the only one who's wasted money on recurring bills that no longer make sense (if they ever did). Plenty of folks on the Your Money message board confessed that they've identified and eliminated such "money suckers."

Perhaps our experiences will inspire you to take a look at your own bills and see which financial vampires need a stake driven through their hearts.

Phone bills

As you read these, you'll probably be struck by the fact that there's no one-size-fits-all solution. Some folks saved money by dropping their land lines and switching to cell phones, while others saved by getting rid of their cells, opting for prepaid or going with an Internet calling service.

What matters is that they tailored their service to the way they live now -- not the way they used to live, or thought they might live.

Posters including "ElizabethM," "eastside-resident78" and "mocha_soy" all eliminated home phone service, saving $35 to $40 a month -- or more than $400 a year. As mocha_soy put it, "I have plenty of minutes left each month on my cell phone, so (home service) was a waste."

ElizabethM still wanted the ability to make calls from home, so she added Skype's Internet calling service, which works over the family's high-speed Internet connection and offers unlimited local and long-distance calls for just $20 a year.

Meanwhile, eastside-resident78 increased her family's savings by switching from regular cell service to a prepaid plan. "Best decision ever," she wrote, "because now we only spend $200-250/year (for both of us) versus $700/year (previous cellphone bill for 2 people)."

On the other hand, "laterbloomer" and "Mikey02" saved money by getting rid of their cell phones. Neither used the services enough to make them worthwhile.

• Video: Living poor and loving it

"If you need to get ahold of me, call the office," Mikey02 wrote. "If I'm not at the office, call the house. If I'm not at the house, call my wife's cell, I am most likely with her."

Poster "isnilk" saved money by dropping "all the fancy schmancy stuff" on the family's home line, including call waiting and caller ID. "Didn't even miss it," isnilk wrote. "Also cut out the long-distance service from the package. Now we use an online prepaid service for the rare long distance calls we make, (which) costs us 1.9 cents/min to call anywhere in the states instead of the 3 cents/min we used to have before."

Continued: Ditch the cable

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