Prepaid Phone Card Buying Advice

What does one thing that a vacationer, a overseas student and a business person all have in common? They are far from home, friends and family. Staying in touch with a familiar voice is comforting and satisfying for a lonely soul. But it can get quite costly making those phone calls which is why a prepaid phone card is ideal.

Prepaid phone cards come in many denominations which determines how much airtime you have available. Depending on the destination you are calling, a call could be as low as 1¢ per minute. But don't assume that the call per minute rate is the only fee that will be deducted from your prepaid calling card. There are various fees such as maintenance fee, carrier service fee and connection fee. If a prepaid phone card contains all those fees than you can bump up that 1¢ call to 4¢ per minute.

Fortunately not all phone cards contain these fees. Here are a few tips that will help you search for a phone card with a budget that you can handle and not leave you wondering where your minutes have disappeared to.

My first advice is to not jump at the first cheapest phone card you can find to call your destination country. Cheap phone cards are notoriously laden with the most fees and poor call quality. If you go ahead and check the card's full details you will see what I mean. So should you totally disregard cheap phone cards? Absolutely not. If you think you can finish off the phone card in one sitting than do it. Because cheap phone card's high fees are deducted after each call or on a weekly basis. So if you can finish off your call in one sitting that means you have avoided the fees and took advantage of the cheap minutes.

My second advice is to try and figure out your calling habit or frequency. If you think that you will need to make an international phone call once a week than choose a calling card with a low weekly maintenance. Even better choose one that has low bi-weekly maintenance fees. These cards usually carry a slightly higher per minute call rate but is still in the reasonable range depending on where you are calling.

My last advice is do not sacrifice call quality for the sake of saving money. Like most things in life the more expensive the item is the higher the quality the item is. The same goes for phone cards. If you are using international phone cards for the sole purpose of business then please purchase a higher quality card. There is nothing more embarrassing then to have a call constantly dropping and making you sound like you are speaking next to a waterfall.