Recently I was talking to a person that wanted to phone long distance to talk to her parents and as you would expect it costs money to dial to an international destination. The interesting thing is, she used an online messaging software and so did her parents. However, she mentioned that they wanted to use the phone as she would rather speak to a person than use text messages.

The thing that puzzled me was that there was actually a video chat feature built into the software and I was curious why they weren’t using that instead to save money on top of the benefit that you can actually see the person. At first she mentioned that she didn’t know this and that it must be expensive to setup. As most of you know, unless you want to use high end equipment these types of things can cost about $20 to get going.

After guiding them on how to set everything up they seemed so amazed and how they can save money from having to call long distance all the time. Many times I often hear how people want to stay with the old as it works fine and that upgrading to take advantage of more modern day offerings seems like a waste of money. In situations like this though, it can pay itself in the long run by taking advantage of new offerings.

You can often the save money from buying more updated equipment as well that revolve around energy consumption. Like a car, for the most part a modern day vehicle can get you more mileage for your gas compared to one say a decade ago. With electronic equipments, many of the more recent builds are way more energy efficient than a stone age model as well.

So of course you have to do the research and see if you truly will be saving money by upgrading or adapting to modern day offerings. Not only can you save money, but it might just make your routine a lot more enjoyable.

Anyone else read this story about Rogers Communication introducing a new plan to potentially get more people to use their cell phones as their home land lines as well? I know a lot of people are already using their cell phones as their primary home line to save money.

As stated on the article, you would need a high speed Internet access for this plan to work. I personally still use both as I would find it to be a little of a hassle having to charge up a cell phone to talk at home. The other reason is that I have routers at the house which sometimes interferes with the cell phone reception and using a traditional land line is the only real guarantee of reliability. In that case it still made sense to pay for a traditional phone line as well.

That is a nice thought being able to use just one phone for all from a residential point of view. I don’t think this would necessarily change the habits of people who run some sort of business activity though. Come to think of it, a lot of people I know have multiple phones/numbers for the sake organizing say work related calls, personal use and specific people for some kind of VIP contact.