The Thrifty Accountant Newsletter

--Two minutes of money saving strategies

Greetings fellow thrifty accountants!

You need copies of your personal medical records, and you don't want everyone in the office to see them. You're closing on a new house--and you'd like to get an estimate of your closing costs, but you don't want the cost of your new house to be the subject of lunchroom talk.

Have you ever been in these situations? If you had a fax machine at home, you could get those items faxed to you at home. Well, you don't need to buy a fax machine and hassle with setting it up because you can subscribe to an Internet fax service that allows you to receive faxes as email attachments--for less than $24/year.

Two great deals currently available in the faxing world:

www.maxemail.com

Lets you set up an account for incoming faxes for only $24/year (plus $10 setup fee). The $24/year account allows you to receive up to 100 pages per month at a non-local number (sender pays long-distance charges).

There is a limit of 100 pages/month, 5 cents per page after that.

www.efax.com

I have been using EFax for several years: EFax Plus for $16.95/month, up to 130 pages incoming faxes, using a local number, $0.15/page over the 130 page limit. The thing I like about Internet faxing is you can:

• Save your faxes, since they come in an email
• Easily forward the faxes to someone
• Receive the faxes at multiple email address (home and work for example)
• You can access your faxes without being tied to the physical fax machine (think vacations)
• Skip the "junk" faxes
• Avoid paying for a dedicated line for incoming faxes
• We still use a fax machine for outgoing faxes--but we have fewer and fewer faxes going out

Both services have higher cost accounts that provide more services.

Editor's note: Prices are current as of July 2009 for both services. If I were setting up an account today I would choose Maxemail.

November 2005 | Issue #003