In this article I’m going to tell you a story about how I discovered the wonders of Skype VOIP and how using it has saved me hundreds of dollars a month on my phone bill. I’ll also explain how you can set up Skype in your own home so you can start saving money too.
Skype is free software that lets you turn your computer into a phone. You can talk to other Skype users for free and you can also call standard landlines and cell phones for a small fee.
Skype has been around for years and I always meant to look into it. But for whatever reason I just never got around to it. Truthfully, I wasn’t even sure how Skype worked. Besides the Verizon calling plan we had was fairly reasonable and we didn’t make a ton of calls anyway.
That all changed when my mother in law passed away last March. You see she was born and raised in Italy and so my wife’s entire family is on the other side of the Atlantic. My wife rarely talked to them in the past because the calls were so expensive, but when her mom died she had a lot of calls to make to inform the family overseas. (At about the same time her best friend moved to Greece which meant even more international calls were on the horizon).
Anyway, when my wife’s mom passed away we really didn’t stop to consider the telephone charges we were racking up. Until the phone bill came that is. I almost fell out of my chair when I saw the bill for $370!
That same day I called my buddy Paul and asked him the best way to set up Skype for our international calls. We had a few criteria that needed to be met:
- We wanted to use a standard cordless telephone. The “Skype-ready” phones all looked kinda cheesy and we didn’t want a headset to plugin to the PC. We wanted to be able to walk around as if we were on a standard call.
- It had to be easy to setup and maintain. I’m good at figuring things out but I also needed to explain it to my technophobe wife in plain English so she could understand too.
- It had to be cheap.
Here’s the setup he recommended and it has worked out perfectly for us:
We installed the Skype software on our home PC so we’d be able to make some calls. Then we added $10 in Skype credit so we could call non-Skype users. Skype is always pre-paid and you can see how much you’re using at any time so there are no surprises when the bill arrives.
In order to use a standard cordless phone we needed to pickup an adaptor. The adaptor connects to the computer and the internet connection and then you just plug the phone into the adaptor instead of a wall jack. We picked up this inexpensive Skype adaptor
NOTE – For some reason the adaptor is now listed as $149 at Amazon. This is the exact same model I bought 4 months ago for $18.99…I have no idea why the price suddenly shot up so ridiculously high. Shop around.
Now when my wife wants to call Italy or Greece she simply opens up the Skype window and dials the number right on the screen and her family in Italy can’t even tell the difference.
Want to know how much I saved? Well under Verizon (we didn’t have an International calling plan at the time) we got hit with a $2.96 per minute charge for calls to Italy! Calls to Greece were $3.78 a minute!
With Skype, we pay just over 2 cents a minute to either country.
Let me say that again…2 cents a minute with Skype.
Without Skype a 20 minute call to Italy would cost me $59.20. With Skype its about 40 cents.
That’s a savings of about 14,800%!
I’m with Skype for good now. 
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I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
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