If you are going abroad with an iPhone, then make sure you take some simple steps to prevent spending a small fortune to check email and make calls. Many travelers have gotten home to find they owe a possibly giant check, drawn from their bank account. Unaware travelers can unknowingly rack up huge bills on their iPhones while traveling abroad.

The international roaming calling rates are bad enough, but data usage is what really delivers the sting. The root of the problem is that the iPhone, with all its apps, positively inhales data. Because domestic plans feature unlimited data, few users bother to track the amount they send and receive.

When you travel to a foreign country, this cheap smorgasbord of bits and bytes becomes a pricey a la carte menu. Worst case scenario, you don't sign up for any international plan and use your phone as you would at home, checking e-mail, sending photos and adjusting your fantasy football roster from the beach while enjoying an ice-cold beer and taunting your friends in chillier climates.

When you get home, the bill could be hundreds or thousands of your currency.

There are some steps you can take to maintain some of the functionality of the phone without the monster bill, but it will still cost you extra.

First, learn how to make some simple changes to your iPhone functions:

- The easiest thing you can do is to go into flight mode. But this now means you have a useless phone that can’t make or receive calls, check e-mail or send text messages.

- Shut off “Data Roaming”. You can do this by going to “Settings”, then “General”, then “Network”. Shut off Data Roaming here. Now you will not run up costs on high-priced data, but still make phone calls.

- Shut off “Fetch”. Go to “Settings”, then “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” and “Fetch New Data”. Now turn off the “Fetch” options so you won’t automatically download e-mail.

- Buy an international calling plan option, or bolt on. They have various prices for the options. This covers phone calls. You can also look at adding Skype to your iPhone.

- Buy an international data plan option, or bolt on. There are various prices for minutes, with the more minutes you buy the cheaper per minute cost.  With most plans WIFI is free, so try to use that and not 3g and you will save.

- Before using your iPhone in another country, you should also reset your usage statistics so you can track how close you are to your limit. Go to "Settings," then "General" and "Usage." The reset option is at the bottom. Also on the same page, there is a listing for "Cellular Network Data." This can grow at an astounding speed.  You should also get a free number to your service provider so you can call them and check on how the costs are adding up.

If you can get access to wireless Internet access, you can dodge most of these charges. Establish a connection with the network, use Skype or another Internet phone service for all voice calls and use the wireless network to surf the Web and check e-mail.

While it is true that the iPhone is the next best thing to sliced bread, but make sure that you don’t overload the bill with too many extra hidden calories and costs.