My mom once again went and swtiched her plan from unlimited to only a few hundred minutes to save ten dollars a month, now it came and bit her in the ass. When you go over the limit every call you even receive is racking up giant fees, one received call she was charged 40 bucks for.
:smack:This is some kind of mental issue, she is using cell phones so old they have to be plugged in to be used. She won’t use a unlimited pre-paid phone and that is that, she will not accept help from me goes to the cell phone store and gets frustrated the employees try to sell her iphone 5s due to commission. She is goddamn determined to give Sprint thousands of dollars for nothing, even the customer service reps have asked her why she isn’t on unlimited.
Years ago when I worked security in the cell phone store, this Somali couple came in, the husband steaming mad about overages on their bill. Clerk explains that they have a N minute (like 500 or 800) plan and they used N + X minutes, so per their contract, they are being charged for X minutes. Husband kept demanding to know why they went over, clerk says he has no idea why THEY went over. Comes down to it being the wife’s phone responsible for the overages. Also comes out they’ve only had it a couple of months and been over every month.
Clerk reasonably suggests that they change their plan to one with more minutes. Husband refuses to pay for that, also refuses to pay for overages, still keeps demanding to know how they went over. Clerk says fine, they can just suspend the account until it’s paid, and NO, he can’t tell them why SHE keeps going over their minutes.
Finally the wife gets involved in the conversation, claiming that she did not use all those minutes. Clerk explains how many minutes a day this works out to (500 would be less than 20 minutes a day, 800 less than 30 per day) and wife admits that she uses it more than that. Argument over them paying it continues for a while until clerk finally snaps at the wife Then why don’t you just shut up once in a while! :eek:
Not going to defend the clerk for saying that, but goddamn, was it funny.
They ended up paying the overages, but refusing to spring for a plan with more minutes.
On the OP… $40 for one call? AT&T Overage charge is like 45 cents a minute (holy shit!) if you’re only on the lowest plan, so that would be about an hour and a half on that call alone.
I don’t know if anyone offers anything comparable in America, but I have a type of contract that might be acceptable for her.
There is only a small monthly fee for data (and even that is optional) and it doesn’t include any minutes, but there is a monthly upper limit on the bill. That limit is about twice as much as it would cost to buy unlimited minutes.
It is really meant for light users who can’t quite justify unlimited minutes but still want the peace of mind that they will never bankrupt themselves. In her case it would combine an attractive sticker price with a manageable end price.
Because it is easier to pay the money than to learn something new. It really really is, and unless she is starving herself to pay her phonebill leave her alone and stop trying to complicate her life.
You say that she refuses to use an unlimited prepaid phone. Would she use a limited prepaid phone? Get a plan where you prepay $x and that gets you y minutes. As soon as she uses up y minutes, she gets cut off. If she wants to talk more, she can add more dollars to her plan. No surprise bills after the fact and you get realtime feedback on your calling habits. And since you are only paying (for example) $10 at a time, you can maintain the illusion that you don’t have a $40 bill to pay for unlimited service.
At 45 cents a minute, talking 24 hours a day for 30 days, that’s only 19 grand.
At 10 dollars for 2 gig of data (guessing on price there), to use up the remaining 49 grand they’d have to use 2,450 gigabytes of data.
At 20 cents a text, they’d have to send/receive 245,000 texts in a single month to use up 49 grand.
Maybe if they had it set up as a mobile hotspot and were downloading the entire Netflix streaming library or something…
Methinks that in that situation the person with the huge bill must have inadvertently signed up for some third party “services” (in the same sense that a bull “services” a cow)… or has some kind of virus that is letting Bad Guys use their phone bill somehow.
Grude: any way you could arrange for your mother’s phone to be “on my corporate account - I get a GREAT discount. Just 30 bucks a month. Well, OK, if you insist, mom, you can pay me the 30 bucks a month, but it has to go through my shared bill”.
As an aside: Typo Knig got chewed out by his wife (that’d be me) when we had 200 bucks in overages one month.
See, our usual usage is 300-400 shared minutes a month, and our plan allows for 700. More than enough. Then he used it a lot for conference calls one month. I caught that before the end of the billing period and was able to bump the plan enough retroactively to avoid steep charges. Then he quit using it that way, so after a couple months I dropped it back down.
Then again last summer. Lots of conference calls, he didn’t think to mention it to me. I didn’t spot it before the end of the billing period so it was too late to do the retroactive change. I saw the bill and was… displeased. A call to Verizon and an automatic courtesy 25% reduction… I whined a bit more and got bumped upstairs and they took another 90 bucks off with the proviso that we extend the contract on that phone a couple more months. Since our son’s phone is going to be on contract longer than that, it was cool. And I was fine with paying something in overages, considering it a “stoopid consumer” fee, just 200 sounded outlandish. I think it helped that I reminded them we’d been customers for nearly 18 years, rarely went near our limits on anything, etc (as in, we’ve been overpaying all these years).
So it’s not just people who “don’t understand”… it is highly educated, intelligent people who just don’t pay attention. :smack:
Did you mention your financial dealings do your husband? If not, then how would he know that his calls were causing issues? If he knows the potential problem, maybe he’d let you know.
Yes indeedy I did. First time around when I spotted the unusual usage and impending big bill, I mentioned it and that I’d bumped up our allowance. He told me about the unusual call volume then.
His usage went down a month or so later, so I dropped our ceiling. All was well until a year or so later when, again, he started using it a lot more for a month or so - and didn’t remember to mention it to me. :smack:
Now, he has a calendar reminder to himself to check the usage once a week since it’s his own usage that has posed so many problems.
The phone company wasn’t terribly helpful. They had automated alerts that let you know when you’ve hit certain percentages of things like texts (we have a 500/month package) or data, but not minutes charges. Bastids. So one fine Sunday morning when we were sleeping in, we got a notification that we’d used 50% of our monthly text allowance (when the month was to end 3 days later)… but not any kind of warning that we were going to run up some nice juicy minutes overages.
Supposedly they have that now (this is Verizon) but we haven’t pushed the limit so it’s a nonissue so far.
The thing is, the song and dance really shouldn’t be required. In a functioning market, at any particular time there would be one price per unit for bandwidth, and you would pay approximately that. This whole “x amount of bandwidth costs $y if you had a plan beforehand, but $z if you didn’t” is a needless added complication.
Not that I have a lot of empathy for the “get the cheapest plan and complain about overages every month” crowd, but the game they are losing at doesn’t really have to be played.
Roaming charges are fierce, especially outside the USA.
From the AT&T website; $0.0195/KB
So that’s $19.50 per megabyte, or $19,500 per GB if you don’t have their international plan in place.
I once spoke to a man who said he went on a Caribean cruise, checked his email and watched a couple of youtube videos thinking nothing of it, and came home to a $1500 bill.
Given that there is no justifiable expense related reason for such charges, they can only be “Because we can”.