I have known Skype can save me money on my phone bills; however I did not know how much. So I asked John, my neighbor, to show me his latest phone bill. He is paying $33.03 for his plan, which includes unlimited local calls, call waiting and caller id. $23 of the total goes to AT&T and the rest ($10.03) goes to taxes and fees. His plan charges 10 cents for each minute of long distance calls; however the bill does not show any long distance charges as John uses his cell for long distances and I do not know the fees and taxes associated with long distance calls.

Each month, I am paying Skype $2.95 for unlimited calls in US and Canada plus $2.50 for a SkypeIn number. The total comes to $5.45. This is 16.5% of what my neighbor is paying. On top of this, to conserve my cell minutes, I use Skype to make long distance calls while at home. I easily make over 300 minutes of long distance calls monthly and this amounts to another $30 saving. When including long distance calls, I would be comparing $5.45 to $63.03; this is a saving of over 90% or $690 annually.

I had ignored the 3-5 international calls my family made monthly in the calculation as I did not need them to make my case.

I showed these numbers to John and he was convinced, especially after he learned that Skype is the largest long distance phone company worldwide.

As a returned favor, I helped John to set up Skype in his house which took less than 15 minutes. It took this long only because of the beer and the old notebook that John decided to use as the Skype server for his entire house. He purchased some Skype phones from our website and was planning a Florida vacation using the money he saved.

The next article Skype - Introduction will explain what is Skype.