WANT TO HEAR a shocker? My family ran up nearly $2700 in phone bills over the last 12 months. And that doesn’t include new cell phones, or our landlinebased DSL Internet access.

Why so much? We have two adults and two adolescents. That’s four cell phones and lots of text messages. We also have two landlines—one for the family and the other for my home office.

Like just about everyone else these days, I need to save money any way I can, so I researched how to lower our telephone expenses. Here’s how I did it, and how you can do the same.

By reviewing your phone bills for unnecessary options and by using VoIP for long-distance calls, you can reduce your telephone expenses.

Focus on Cell Phones

Cell phones are the biggest expense in our family—and probably in your household, too. Our bills tally more than $160 most months.

But before you can reduce your cell phone costs, you need to know what you’re paying for. Start by examining your last cell bill, but it won’t be easy—our most recent Verizon bill ran 34 pages and required a translator.

I found more information, in easier-to-read form, on Verizon’s Web site. If you’re a Verizon user, you can log in to the site with your user name and password. Click the My Bill tab, stay on the Bill Summary tab, and click the Voice link. A pop-up will identify how many minutes each family member used during that month, plus the total. You can check other past bills, as well.

This information led me to an important discovery: Our family was regularly using 500 to 600 anytime minutes per month—far less than the 1400 we were paying for. Right there was a way to save money. But how much? That wasn’t on the bill.

This brings us to the translator I mentioned earlier. To obtain really detailed cost information, you have to call your carrier and slog through push-button hell until you reach an actual, knowledgeable human being.

The human being I reached (who was very nice and who understood my need to cut expenses) told me that I would save $20 a month by going down to 700 minutes. She said that I could save another $30 by eliminating our unlimited texting.

Taking $20 oa a $160 telephone bill may not sound like much, but it’s a start. You can also reduce your cell phone costs by attacking the usage charges that vary every month. Here are a few tips.

Keep an eye on the minutes: Most companies give you several ways to track the minutes you’ve used during a billing cycle. For example, Verizon users can dial #646 for a free text message.

Block music downloads and applications: Kids may learn that they can download music and play games on their phone, but they don’t consider that it will show up on the phone bill. And anyone can accidentally access the Internet and incur a charge.

Shop for better rates: Comparing plans is easy, but moving an entire family to a new carrier can be expensive. If you’ve added family members to your current plan at different times, each phone number may have a different contract end date, which means that moving en masse to another carrier would incur multiple termination fees. For a family of four, the charges could run into hundreds of dollars. The solution? Don’t make changes (that is, stick with your current phones) until everyone’s contract expires. Then everyone will be in sync.

Consider a prepaid plan: If you use fewer than 200 minutes a month, a prepaid plan is probably the best option.

Watch who you call: Toll-free (800) numbers aren’t tollfree when called from a cell phone, except on weekends. And international calls, even to Canada, are outrageously expensive. But calls to other cell phones attached to the same carrier may be unlimited.

Make sure everyone knows the rules: Ban long, casual phone calls before 9:00 p.m. on weekdays (or whenever your service’s peak time ends). Keep texting to a minimum, too. (I admit that we had to give up on that one.)

Keep the Land line?

Here’s a big question: If you have cell phones, do you still need a landline? A lot of people don’t bother with them.

And yet my family has two landline phones. We keep the home phone because my wife doesn’t want to give it up and because she’s reluctant to make our friends learn a new phone number for personal calls. Meanwhile, I need my home-office phone so that I can keep my work and home lives separate. I give my office number to all sorts of people that I wouldn’t want to share my home or cell numbers with.

Despite what some folks think, you don’t need a landline to be able to make 911 calls. Cell phones work just fine in an emergency. And if the electricity goes out, they are actually better than most of today’s landline phones, which require AC power.

It’s true that a landline gives you unlimited local, incoming, and toll-free calls, and lower per-minute charges in many situations. And another consideration is DSL, which comes over the phone line. If that’s your source for Internet access, you’ll have to switch either to cable service or to a socalled naked DSL account that doesn’t involve analog phone service. Either alternative would be costlier. AT&T would charge me $10 a month more for the DSL package I have now if our house were stripped of landline phone service.

So if you intend to keep your landline, how do you lower its costs?

Examine your bill—both local and long distance—for extra, optional charges. If you’re unsure what a charge means, don’t hesitate to call the phone company and ask.

I found a few things on our bills that once must have seemed like good ideas—but no longer do. On our local bills, for instance, we were being charged $7 each month for something called Wire- Pro, which is insurance to cover home wiring problems. As is true of an extended warranty on a new TV set, not having it is something of a gamble, but the money saved is worth the risk.

On the long-distance bill, we were paying $9 a month to lower our national and international by-the-minute fees. But even with the higher fees in place, we weren’t making enough long-distance calls to total $9 a month.

That’s $16 saved monthly, as long as our wires hold out and we don’t go overboard on long-distance calls.

Into the VoIP

Luckily, we have another option for long-distance calls: Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). It’s dirt-cheap, with nearly unlimited minutes.

Once too difficult and unpleasant to listen to, VoIP now offers improved quality and makes a great alternative to landlines or a good supplement to cell phones. And you’re not limited to talking with other VoIP users.

Not that it’s a total win-win option. The audio is improved, but it still sounds worse than that of a landline. And you must either keep a computer on to make and receive phone calls or use special hardware.

Despite these various drawbacks, VoIP seemed like a good alternative to my landline office phone. I looked at two very different services.

You probably think of Skype as a free service for talking and instant messaging with other Skype users, possibly with video. That’s all the free service does, but for a price Skype will connect you to telephones all over the world, and it’ll give you a phone number so other people can call you.

If you don’t phone internationally a lot, Skype’s most attractive offer gives you unlimited calls within the United States and Canada for $3 a month, or $30 a year. Well, sort of: It isn’t really unlimited. You get 10,000 minutes per month, which could be a problem if you’re on the phone more than 6 hours a day. And it isn’t really $30 a year if you want to use it to replace a landline. Maintaining a real phone number costs you another $30 a year, and voicemail $20 more. But that works out to an overall monthly average of less than $7—still a tempting rate.

Skype’s Limitations

Unfortunately there are bigger issues. For one thing, Skype offers no 911 emergency support, though that shouldn’t be a problem if you have a cell phone. In addition, you can’t simply plug a regular phone into Skype. To get around that problem, you can install Skype’s free software on your PC and plug in a microphone (or better yet, a headset); of course, you will have to keep your PC on all the time to receive calls. Alternatively you can buy a stand-alone Skype phone that connects to your computer (which means that you still have to leave it on) or to the Internet directly.

I tried two different Logitech USB headsets, one wired, the other wireless. Both worked. I also tried Belkin’s cell-like Wi-Fi phone, which currently sells at Skype’s site for $130. I liked it de spite its quirks (it tends to make odd sounds as it finds and loses signals), but it doesn’t work with hotspots that require Web authentication, such as at Starbucks coffeehouses.

Also, Skype’s technical support is all but nonexistent. You don’t get any phone or chat support, and the service doesn’t seem to answer e-mail queries quickly, either if it answers them at all.

The biggest problem for  people who would like to use Skype as a landline replacement involves the selection of phone numbers. You can’t transfer your existing number, and you may not be able to get a new number in your area code. But keep trying; on my second attempt, the service reported that it did have some phone numbers in my area code available.

Phone Power, another VoIP provider, offers a more landline-like experience than Skype. You can use your regular phone and transfer your existing phone number to the Phone Power system. But this service is nowhere near as cheap as Skype’s is, and I found setting it up to be quite a challenge.

When you sign up, Phone Power sends you a gadget to daisy-chain between your modem and your router (you can plug it directly into the router if the preferred setup doesn’t work). Then you plug your phone into the gadget and use the phone as you normally would. It includes voicemail (which you can have forwarded to your e-mail address) and 911.

The best plan (3000 outgoing minutes, unlimited incoming) is $23 a month aS er the discounted first three months—considerably more than Skype, but less than a regular phone with voicemail and long-distance fees.

Setup Hassles

During my setup of Phone Power, I would have given up if not for the company’s excellent tech-support staff. I talked to several support representatives as we struggled to get both the phone signal and my Internet connection working. They all proved to be both polite and knowledgeable, and were truly concerned with helping me fix these glitches.

Nevertheless, despite the phone number problem and the lack of support, I’m going with Skype for my office phone. Not only is Skype cheaper, but having an office phone that travels with my computer suits my work habits.

After all those changes, how much have I cut our phone bills? Halving the allocation of cell phone minutes saves us $20 a month. Dropping the landline extras is another $16. Switching to Skype would save me about $33. In the end, that’s close to $70 a month, or over $800 a year. Not a bad reduction when you’re trying to save money in this unpredictable economy.

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