I don't know much about calling cards, but if you have cell phones, do you really need a home phone? If there's an easy way to get ahold of you, there's no need to continue to pay for a land line or VOIP, plus unless you're calling out-of-country, there's generally no long distance charges.

A lot depends on your calling patterns. The more minutes you buy, the cheaper it is. Onesuite has a following, CheapPhoneCards has a following and long time ago I used 10-10phonerates.com to find a dialaround that would be good for me, but after a while it changed rates so I went exclusively to a calling card. Been using a 500 minute one ever since and still have 150 min left. Although I do use my cell phone (prepaid, for best rates) for much of my long distance, since often I make LD calls on the road.

Try the phone card from costco. when you run out of minutes the card can be replenished over the phone for a minimum of five or ten dollars.
the card does not expire.
it is three cents a minute or less for national long distance.

Be careful on the ones that claim they don't expire. Most now won't expire, technically, but many require you add minutes periodically to keep your balance. Read the fine print carefully.

We have used the Costco phone card for years, just adding minutes to it when it was low. They just started this new pratice of a surcharge. "Express Recharge so you never run out of minutes. 15% fee applied to recharges." You can also use it with your cell phone. It is 700 minutes for $19.99, 02.86 cents per minute. You can buy them online or in the store.

Here is a link that might be useful: Verizon 700 minute calling card

Somehow I'm missing something here. Why on earth would someone use a calling card with the cell phone and pay an additional charge??? "Per minute rates are in addition to your cellular airtime charges."

Boy they come up with imaginative scams don't they?!

Use coupon code: DIALEZ to get up to 100 free promotional minutes to call anywhere in the world from the U.S. when you sign up with EZ011.com dial-around phone service. Promotions apply only for Auto-recharge and Postpaid subscribers. (You can sign up as prepaid service and just like a regular calling card, it cuts your call off once it runs out of funds... but you get billed upfront and you don't get the free airtime promo.)

According to ez011.com website:

'EZ011 is an advanced, yet easy-to-use dial-around phone service for your home as well as your wireless plan. Just dial the local access number provided and your registered phone number will automatically be recognized to call anywhere in the world.'

Personally, I set up an account for my grandmother in Florida... she's happy with the service cause her local phone company Embarq has ridiculously expensive long-distance and international calling plans and she doesn't want to pay additional for broadband just to switch to a VOIP provider like Vonage. She only pays what she uses and I manage her account online with no extra equipment to install.

By the way, Best Buy is selling a prepaid mobile phone (O2 Wireless) that includes prepaid international calls with no extra calling card needed. It only deducts the airtime you use... (the only catch is it has to be to landline phones and only works to some 50+ countries) check it out at http://www.o2wirelessservice.com/

Here is a link that might be useful: ez011.com

Prepaid cell phones. My husband and I have about an $80 monthly phone bill cell bill. I am thinking about moving to pre paid cell phones. My husband rarely uses his phone. And don't use at lot as well.I am looking at verizon for better service. We need our land line.
I could reduce our bill probably to $20 per month.
What are the pros/cons.

Back several years ago, I bought a long-distance calling card. Don't remember the brand, I think I got it at WMT. It was ten cents a minute no matter where you called (except maybe overseas, but we don't know anyone overseas so that wasn't a problem for us.). You just dialed the number on the back of the card and then at the prompt, the number you wanted to call.

Then I called Southwestern Bell (it's AT&T now) and told them I wanted the long-distance feature taken off my land line. The guy I talked to assured me he'd done what I wanted and then when I got my bill I found out he'd added a lot of services I didn't ask for. It took me a long time to get that sorted out and corrected. Eventually, someone made a long-distance call on the land line without using the card, and the long-distance feature was automatically placed back on my bill. I've been paying $6 every month ever since, for just having (but not using) this feature. I just haven't had the resolve to go through all that again.

You can buy those pre-paid Go-phones, but if you don't buy new minutes every month, what you have left from the current month expire and you lose them. Frankly, I found the Go-phones a royal pain. Plus, if you do the ten cents a minute plan, it doesn't cost you to call someone else who has a go-phone, but they charge you a dollar a day for every day that you place a call from your phone. It all gets very complicated and I just wish somebody would come up with something simple, no hidden surcharges. I have a cell phone that we use for emergencies (grandson carries it, mostly, when he's out and about, in case he has car trouble and needs us). It costs $10 a month and .25 a minute for every call. Plus there are surcharges. So if we don't use the phone at all in any given month it's actually about $12 a month. We had the $20 plan that came with 100 free minutes, but we found that we didn't use that many minutes a month. With the surcharges, the bill for that was $24. It's a Consumer Cellular product. DD uses Virgin Mobile and has about the same kind of plan that we do.

You do have to watch your land phone bill, too, for surprises. Where I was working last, before I retired, I had to arrange with AT&T to get internet service through them. For that I had to have a copy of the last bill (which I didn't normally see) so I'd have the information I needed to give AT&T. I noticed, on the last page, a "yellow pages" charge of $25. No one at the office seemed to know what it was for. When I investigated, I discovered that someone had called our business a year earlier, had spoken to someone on the phone that had no business authorizing any transaction and had offered them free internet advertising. Turns out the advertising was on some obscure website; it was free for one month only and then you would incur charges for every month thereafter if you didn't instruct them to discontinue. Of course no one did. For a whole year. Longer if I hadn't noticed it. The person who authorized the transaction had no idea that she had done so. She just thought she was getting some free advertising for the non-profit organization.

Seems there's a scam every minute. --Ilene