Suspending Home Phone Service to Save Money

Bellsouth offers a suspend/vacation service for your telephone line. If you aren't going to use your home phone for more than 30 days you can request that they suspend your service and they will even put in a forwarding number for free. This will cut the phone bill approximately by 50% minus any suspend/restore fees.

We were debating canceling the phone completely while we are away on our China assignment, but given that this reduces our bill to ~$12/mo, we still need a phone line to get the reduced DSL price, we will get to keep our phone number, and a suspended line will help people to be able to continue to connect with us (with the forwarding number announcement) I think its worth it.

All we had to do was go to this web page and sign up to suspend our phone service - we didn't even have to deal with talking to a customer service agent. Very simple.

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Comments (6)

This may seem obvious to some people, but don't forget to keep paying your bill every month! Several years ago I used the suspend service from another phone company while abroad to keep my phone number. Well since I was abroad and this was before online billpay was popular, I didn't think about paying the bill since I put it on "suspend." When I came back, I found that my account was handed over to collections and I still lost my phone number. Sucked...

Posted by Mike | October 17, 2007 10:42 AM

BTW, are you guys Chinese? I went to Taiwan for vacation for 2 weeks and I had to say I was miserable due to culture shock -- and I'm Chinese-American! I didn't hear any English (except from my wife) the whole time! Just prepare yourselves if this is a long-term assignment and try to meet some other ex-pats early on (I'm assuming you'll be working with some, so it might not be as bad).

Posted by Mike | October 17, 2007 10:45 AM

I wish time warner and verizon had the same thing.

technically, you can go on vacation mode with verizon, but your voicemail gets shut off, so people just get a busy signal instead of vacation-notification. pretty useless!

can check out my new blog (and blogroll me too please).

http://livingoffdividends.com

thanks.

Posted by Living Off Dividends | October 23, 2007 5:48 PM

That's cool that they allow you to do that without problems or questions. I let go of my home phone a long time ago and went straight cell phone but I understand that's hard to do in your situation with your internet deal tied to it.

My cell service has an internet plan where you connect to your laptop to your phone unlimited for $25 per month... I'm thinking of doing that but not sure if it will be fast / reliable enough.

Posted by BuildAndSucceed | October 26, 2007 10:35 AM

Mike, no Chinese ancestry in either of us, but so far I have adjusted pretty well. You are definitely right, I have a couple expat coworkers here that we hang out with regularly with - makes a huge difference.

I also think the biggest difference is the food. I hear alot of people say they didn't like their visit to China and I suspect its usually because they didn't find good international/western style restaurants.

Posted by 2million | October 29, 2007 8:13 PM

Get Majicjack for $20per year. It runs on your computer. It has awesome quality and works just like landline phone.

Posted by Adi | July 17, 2009 4:46 PM