Money Saving Tips- A Canada Immigrant's Blog

Phone | Professional | Computers | Shopping

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There are many ways one could cut down on their bills in Canada considerably via the Internet. Or find great deals that are not as heavy on your pocket as most brick and mortar big Canadian stores are offering. Here’s a little rundown of some of these.

Phone

Let’s face it, and I have blogged it extensively earlier. Canada has one of the most expensive telecom services in the world. Why? Because of a cartel of common interest telecommunication businesses. Of course, that’s bad news for us.

OK, so that’s the end of the rant. Let’s get our workarounds going.

If you’re not already using any of the ones below, you’ve been living in a cave. You can save so much money it’s ridiculous how you can still cling on to your ‘regular’ phone plans. In fact, unless you’ve won the Ontario Lottery recently, you are really burning hard-earned money if you don’t have at least one of the following! Don’t think twice and do yourself a favour: sign up!

VOIP – The Best Way to Make Cheapest Calls

Get a Free Local Phone Line (Yes, FREE!)

Yup, the wonderful folks at freephoneline.ca will give you a free permanent phone number in your city. There are no catches, no hidden anything (I mean, it’s free, or have you not been reading this?) You can set it up as a permanent number – not having to worry about any overblown, gimmickry and coercive “phone plans” from Canadian Cartel of telecom (which keeps adding more members everyday). Just get to the site, sign up for an account, choose a number, download their application and Bob’s your uncle.

Use freephoneline.ca’s free answering machine to have recorded messages sent to your email whenever you’re not online and someone calls and leaves a message. Brilliant!

Get Skype and call anyone anywhere on the planet for free (What, you don’t have it already?)

– What can I say? The only reason you have not subscribed to Skype is because you’ve been living in a retirement home happily writing cheques for fatcat telecom companies. I mean, don’t even think, get it now!

More Options, and cheaper too…

For the Old Fashioned

Cheap Phones

If you’re determined to be old school and would like to stick to using a phone, save a trip to the convenience store, make cheap calls to the world from your cellphone and make international calls at low rates or buy online a cheap Canada Local Access Numbers calling card to the world or get one of these Online Prepaid Calling Cards to call any country. Save money and don’t just call using your existing big telco ‘service plans’ (which are actually plans that serve the telcos, not you!).

Professional

Get your best foot forward and be a true professional in whatever field you’re in. Job hunting and career building should not cost an arm and a leg, you know.

Free Business Cards

Get free 250 full or mono colour business cards from them delivered to your home. Just pick a nice Template, enter your details and be done with it. Give yourself an advantage over others whenever you’re meeting someone new for the first time. A professionally printed business card is a must! And they’re free!

Resume Submission

Speaking of career and job hunting, before you let a recruitment agent take a percentage or part of your salary, post a free resume. In fact, they even have a professional resume writing service , so if you’re willing to pay a little anyway, get a great resume first and foremost!

Computers

Your computer files, resumes, letters, docs and other data are more valuable and vulnerable than you usually think. How do you back it up? If you’ve been suckered into buying one of those external drives to save your data, remember that it too can break down!

Free Remote Hard Drive

The rule of backup is that the best backup is somewhere physically remote, so even if your entire house floods, at least your data is safe. Get 2GB of free hard disk space on a secure server to store whatever you think is worth preserving! Signup for your free drive now!

Shopping for Bargains and Deals

Get into the habit of shopping online. That’s the best favour you can do to your finances! Buying online not only is convenient, the prices you get are way way better than compared to the best “deals” a regular store can offer.