This week saw British Telecom bring in its latest round of price changes for millions of households that are still with the behemoth. Cunningly it's trumpeting the new charges as good news for customers with 'free weekend calls' but sadly this is not the full story. The changes could actually see your phone bill rocket not fall.

Yet whomever you use for your landline; you can save a fortune.

Bring down line rental charges

BT's line rental's now increased from £11 to £11.75 a month, but £1.75 can be knocked off this by paying your bill by direct debit and opting for paperless billing (viewing your bills online), keeping rental at £10.50 a month..

Full details are in Martin’s Cheapest Home Phones article.

Get free landline calls at the weekend and evenings

With BT's basic Option 1 package you'll get free calls to landlines at the weekend but in reality it's just for the first hour; after that it's up to 4p for an hour. You could put the phone down after 59 minutes and then redial but this still doesn't tackle evening calls during the week which have increased in price by 20 times!

With BT, previously an hour-long call that would have cost 4.5p is now almost £1, as you'll pay 1.5p per minute plus a 6p call connection charge.

The simple solution is to keep your BT line but sign up to override provider Primus Saver 2 which genuinely gives you free weekend and evening calls to landlines. And there's no monthly fee either.

For full details on how to get free evening and weekend calls, read Martin’s full Cheapest Home Phones article.

Cut the cost of calling mobiles in half

Calls to mobiles via BT are a costly 12.5p a minute, but there's an easy way of getting around this.

Use an override provider such as 18185 to get cheaper landline calls to a mobile. This is a prefix number which you dial before the number you wish to ring so your call is routed away from BT, meaning you'll avoid its expensive charges. Using this method knocks weekday calls to mobiles to just 6p a minute.

Use Martin’s free UK CallChecker tool to find the cheapest override provider to call mobiles and read more info in the Cheapest way to call mobiles.

Don't pay over the odds for international calls

BT's charges for overseas calls are staggering too. But it's very easy to bring these down to just a few pence per minute with a wide choice of cheap override providers for international dialling. Instead of paying 25p a minute to call India with BT you can pay just 2p with a host of cheaper rivals, simply by dialling a few extra digits.  Plus if you're on the internet and the person you're calling is; you can talk for free.

All the info is the cheapest way to call overseas article; plus to find the cheapest override provider for each country use the free International CallChecker tool

We invited three volunteers into the studio to see how much they could save. In total, by following many of these steps, they could save £1,000 a year between them.