What are Those Hidden Charges on the Telephone Bills?

If you're anything like me you will quite annoyed as the monthly bills get shoved through the letterbox. Not because they're bills (although no one welcomes these!), but because they seems to be laid out in such an unnecessarily complicated way. This is particularly the case with telephone bills. Honestly, what should be a simple list of calls and costs, reads like a foreign language, and I've lost count how many times I've had to call head office to get certain items explained to me.

In fact, reading my monthly telephone bills each month had become such a headache that I was hoping that someday, the phone companies would start sending a manual along with the darn things. I swear that each month they became more and more complicated. Why they were different each time was a mystery to me because I do not have long distance on my telephone as I've always used my cell phone for all long distance calls. Therefore, you would think that my telephone bills would have always been the same. Wrong! Each month, it was different. Sometimes it was only a few cents different, but it was still different nonetheless.

To say that understanding Telephone bills is not always easy is a gross understatement. My telephone bills used to have tons of additional fees added onto them each and every month. Some of them I understood but others were simply a mystery at the time. Someone could have had their own personal fees on there and put money into their own pockets for all I knew. I suspect that most people have been in the same state of confusion as I was. In fact, I'm pretty certain these bills are written in they way that they are for good reason.

As I said earlier, there were times when I had to call my phone company and ask them to go over my telephone bills with me. Someone usually did, but I swear their explanations were still meaningless to me. Basically, the government is continuously adding all kinds of fees to our telephone bills. I don't mind paying t fee for the 9-1-1 emergency system. Heck, I'm more than okay with paying that fee, but some of those other fees are just getting out of control.

Listen folks, I suggest you Examine your monthly bill closely. Since more and more people than ever before are using cheap VOIP services, which simply means making free or cheap calls from computers, I think the telecommunication companies are trying to sneakily claw back some lost revenue by adding latent style charges to landlines.

One gentleman at the head quarters of my local phone company explained that the reason there's so much going on with these paper bills is because the statements have to show all the basic monthly charges and dialing charges etc. He went on to say that telephone bills must contain full and accurate descriptions of all charges and clear identification of each company responsible for those charges. Well, I still think they're made to confuse the customer and to hide charges that we might otherwise be able to drop should we know what they are.

In fact, that's exactly what I did. I made it my mission to understand every item on these bills and the results were flabbergasting. I became more competent at picking out all kinds of things which appeared on these statements. It turned out that many were actually features I had available to me that I neither requested nor knew about. I called the company and had them removed promptly, and guess what? I now have lower monthly telephone bills as a result.

Make sure you look over your telephone bills and analyze them. Check that you aren't being charged for something that you never knew you had either. All of those extra features, such as caller ID and voice mail, will be added to your telephone bills.

The only feature that I willingly pay for is Caller ID. My telephone bills could be $8.00 cheaper every month, but that is one feature that I am happily paying for. I despise answering the phone when I have no a clue who it is.

Anyhow, it's time for me to get down from my soap box, but this is just something I felt I needed to get off my chest. I also though it my duty as a consumer to inform others about what might be going on in your states with you phone companies.



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