Youve probably received a flyer recently from your phone company that offers a discount if you purchase a bundle of services.

For example, if you give companies like A T & T your home and cell phone service, your long distance, and your satellite TV subscription, doing this might save you a whopping $5 or $10 per month.

Be warned: Its a bad deal.

First, the savings involved are paltry. Second, there are big fees that they ding you with whenever you want to drop a part of the bundle.

Third, and most important, youll be paying for a lot of garbage items that you may not use, or that you were ignorant about consenting to.

For example, some bundles require you to have two or more customized calling features on your residential phone account, such as call forwarding and call waiting.

By the way, they sub-bundle the bundles: just try to order call waiting, which is a useful feature, without adding call forwarding, which I may have used once in this lifetime.

And this is the point. If you start to scrutinize your phone bills youll see a lot of recurring charges that really add up.

For instance, I eliminated about $40 worth of monthly fees from an account this week. A great amount of this came from deleting my long distance calling plan.

You can do this, and it makes sense if youre already pre-paying for hundreds or thousands of anywhere minutes on your cell phone account. Why not place your long distance calls on your wireless device?

By knocking out the land lines long distance, I also saved a decent amount of money on the Federal taxes that we pay.

Scrutinize these bundles very carefully before committing. Its a great deal for these companies, but a questionable one for us!