Do you Yak?

And by "Yak" I mean "on the phone", not "vomit".
Okay, so now that we have that out of the way...

In my ongoing quest to cut costs and save money, I have been looking for the best value when it comes to telephone, internet and cable/satellite rates. Currently I have my telephone and Internet bundled though one major Canadian Company, and for TV we have a Satellite Dish through another company.

A friend of mine told me about Yak. She uses it for her long distance calls. Instead of having them charged by her regular phone company, you can opt out of their long distance plan (no fee or penalty) by signing up for Yak.

Yak is a Canadian company. In Canada, all long distance calls, anywhere, anytime across the country are 3.5 cents/minute. With my phone company, I had a long distance plan that was a flat rate of 18.95/month for calls made anytime, anywhere within Ontario, not Canada as a whole. This wasn't a big deal to me though as I only currently call only one person living outside of Ontario anyway and his number is still an Ontario cell phone number.

However, I took my last phone bill and added up all the long distance minutes on it. When I took that total and multiplied it by Yak's rate of 3.5 cents/minute, it came to less than $5.
And there I was paying $18.95. And on my bill it said I had "saved " over $100 by using the flat $18.95 rate plan.

Huh. Well that was enough for me. So I checked out Yak's website.

There's a huge list of countries and their corresponding long distance rates/minute. Long Distance calls across Canada,to the US and China are all 3.5 cents/minute. Rates vary for all other countries, as you will see. I called the company at 10pm on a Friday night (love how we can do that now!) and signed up for their plan. Best part was that they take care of notifying my phone company. I still have my phone, same phone number, and everything else through them, and it is still bundled with my internet, I just no longer have a long distance plan with them. It took 5 minutes to complete the phone call, and three business days to complete the transaction. So now, I will most often be paying less than $5/month for long distance calls. If I don't make any long distance calls, I pay nothing. And there are no weird codes or anything to dial before making your call - it works exactly the same as before, just the bill is from a different company. And is a lot smaller.

Nice.

The monthly bill comes to you through email and you can opt to have it charged directly to your credit card or automatically withdrawn from your bank account.

While on the phone with them last Friday night they asked me how I had heard about Yak and I said "through a friend". Turns out she recieved a referral bonus which works out to about $5 off her next phone bill. All I needed to provide them was her phone number or her referral number, which is given to you once you start using their services.

You can use Yak for your cell phone too! Just make sure that by opting out of the long distance plan your regular company provides, you won't be penalized in any way.

My advice? Have a look at your phone bill, add up your long distance minutes and multiply the total by 0.035. That's what you would pay with Yak.

Are you with the right long distance plan?

If you decide to sign up and want to give them my referral number, that would be great. It's 409653. You can also give them your referring person's phone number if you don't have their account number. So if any of you reading this know Sheila and would rather use her as your referral, you could give them her phone number. But of course, don't feel you have to go that extra step.

Check it out! Save money!