To reduce phone spending, consider buying the absolute cheapest land-line phone service, sometimes as low as $5 a month, along with one add-on service, call forwarding, says the nonprofit Telecommunications Research and Action Center. Set up your land line to forward incoming calls to your cell phone, assuming you have plenty of wireless minutes to spare. Make outbound calls with the cell phone. This is an alternative to going completely wireless, giving you a land-line backup.
Business line alternative
If you pay for a second phone line to have a different number for your home business, consider using Google's GrandCentral service, www.grandcentral.com. GrandCentral gives you a free number - you can choose from many area codes - and you tell GrandCentral which phone that number should ring.
For example, if you work at home alone during the day, tell GrandCentral to route business calls to your home land-line phone. At night, when other family members are home, or if you're traveling, tell GrandCentral to send calls to your cell phone. Callers won't know the difference. It can even ring multiple phones at the same time.
This is an alternative to having all business calls go to a cell phone, where you use up minutes and can suffer poor audio quality. GrandCentral is in the "beta" testing phase and said you have to be invited to use the service, but I signed up and was quickly invited. Others have reported the same experience.
If it works for you, you can cancel that business phone line and save money.
Hungry to spend
Exposure to something that whets the appetite, such as a picture of a dessert, can make a person more impulsive with unrelated purchases, finds a study from the Journal of Consumer Research.
For example, the study reveals that the aroma of chocolate chip cookies can prompt women on a tight budget to splurge on a new item of clothing, researcher Xiuping Li of the National University of Singapore found.
The lesson: Know thyself. Whether we like it or not, we can be tricked into buying.
yourmoney@tribune.com
Gregory Karp is a personal finance writer for The Morning Call, a Tribune Co. newspaper in Allentown, Pa.
