Alternatives to LOCAL phone service???

Edwards Finance > Phones

Q. I am going to be moving to a "new" (built in 1915) house at the end of this month. So far, I've gotten the heat, water and electric turned on at the new place. I haven't transferred or turned on new phone service, though. For the past couple of years, I have thought on and off about disconnecting my local phone service. About 80% of the messages on my answering machine are advertisements from various companies. I feel like I'm paying to give them another way to intrude into my life. Most of my friends and family contact me via email, which I can access from the public library a couple of times a week. My wife also has voice mail at work, and she can use the phone there for local calls during her lunch hour, or before/after work. We also can access the phone at church before or after church, or when we babysit in the nursery.

A. One problem that I have with the scenario of pulling the plug on this monthly fee is that people would have to leave messages on my wife's voice mail at work. I was wondering, are there any inexpensive voice mail solutions that a person can access by calling an 800 number, or something similar? I used to have something like this through a service called Onebox, but now that service costs $13 a month. (I can get unlimited local calling for $15 a month, or $23 when you add on all the taxes and such) I was wondering if anyone knows of a way to get a voice mail box for around $5 a month or less, just so we could have a way for people to leave us messages if they need to, and for us to access the messages whenever it is convenient for us to do so. I spent the summer away from my home, onboard my boat and used my cell 95% of the time for local and long distance calls. I still had an answering machine on my home phone that I could call into and had the cell number on the recorded message. Since I have a plan that allowed free long distance it took advantage of this and never made any long distance from my home phone for 3 month. After reviewing my home phone bills, I found I was still paying about $8 a month in misc. fees/taxes to them.. I contacted my local phone company about just dropping (No Select) long distance service.. I was told that I would have to pay $20 to discontinue my selected long distance service.. Now that seems like a rip-off since you can change long distance service providers without a fee, but have to pay $20 to discontinue one. So, where am I at now?? I'm using the cell service for my long distance, but still paying the for ATT which I never use.. Kind of a matter of principle, even though it's costing me $8 a month. AFAIK there IS a fee for switching LD providers. Usually the new provider pays the fee for you as an incentive to switch. You would rather pay $96 a year than a one-time $20 fee? If you're not using your land line LD, cancel it, eat the one-time fee, realize long term savings. We cancelled our LD carrier and use a dial-around (10-10) for all LD, 4 cents a minute, no monthly fee, including in-state calls. That plan's no longer available for new customers, but there are others: http://www.10-10phonerates.com/. Or just use your cell.

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