OK, here’s the deal. We don’t have a cellphone in our household, and we don’t really want one. As grad students, we spend much of our time working at home anyway, and we don’t really need to be contactable during the times when we’re out of the house. Also, neither of us spend much time on the phone anyway.
But we’ve decided that it would be good to have some sort of prepaid cellphone for emergencies. My wife, quite reasonably, says she would feel safer when she’s out alone if she had a cellphone. That way, if the old Volvo we share with a friend breaks down at night, she can call someone. Or if she looks like getting into any trouble, she can call 911.
We have no interest in making regular calls on the cellphone. We literally just want something that would sit unused until a real emergency (hopefully never) comes up. For this reason, and because we don’t have a great deal of money, we want to do this as cheaply as possible. No plans with 500 minutes a month or any of that crap.
I know from reading various threads on the Dope that getting a cellphone of any sort can be a minefield of small print and unexpected costs, so i’m seeking help from people who have some experience with the sort of thing that we want to do, or with cellphones in general. Does anyone have any advice or warnings?
I purchased one for my Dad at Sears. You can buy increments of 15 minutes on it and it tells you on each call how much time you have left. Some of the time will roll over to the next month (I think). You’ll have to check that with your provider to see how much they’ll rip you off on unused minutes.
I’ve got a Tracfone phone. You buy your own phone (about $50), and then buy minutes as you see fit. If you buy 30 minutes or so at a time, you have to buy about once a month – so I buy a year’s worth (around 300 minutes, around $100) and just let them sit.
Not super cheap, but not an ongoing expense. I use the phone extremely infrequently (as in, I’ve had it a year and a half and still don’t know the number by heart), but it’s nice for emergencies, or for when you’re meeting someone and are running late, etc.
My husband has a Tracfone. As twickster says, you need to buy either a small number of minutes often or a year’s worth of minutes once. The minutes don’t expire unless the phone is deactivated, which happens when the minutes expire. Or something like that.
Thanks for the advice. Tracfone looks like a reasonably good deal. I went to the “Purchase Airtime” section of their website, and they have a 1 year prepaid plan, which includes 1 year of active service and 150 units (is 1 unit equal to 1 minute?) for $90, and 300 units for $130.
I wonder, though, has anyone had any of these problems with Tracfone? Some of that stuff is a bit worrying.
I glanced at the link – I’ve never had any problems with them, but I usually buy minutes online, which might or might not make a difference.
On 150 minutes vs. 300 minutes – when I bought the phone, they gave me a booklet with a bunch of promotional codes – and they email me about once a month or so with other promos, which are usually about “buy x minutes, get x minutes free.”
(And I think if you bring in a new customer, you can also get free minutes, so if you want to use me as a recommender, let me know … )
I’ll talk this all over with my wife, and if we decide to go with a Tracfone, i’d be happy for you to recommend us if it will get you some free minutes. I’ll come back to this thread once she decides what she wants to do.
I believe Virgin has similar plans – I looked at them also when I was thinking about getting a cellphone, and ended up going with Tracfone because there was a good deal on the actual phone at the exact moment when I was ready to move on this. Hopefully someone who’s got another plan will come in with more info for you.
Or, if you truly want 911-type emergency communication only, just get an old deactivated phone from one of your friends. By law, all cell phones must be able to connect to 911 even if they do not have a paid provider. Just keep it charged and you’re good to go. Cost = $0.
(Full disclosure: Mr. S and I switched to Tracfones this year and love them. Instead of paying $55/month for two phones, I bought the one-year plan for $95 with more minutes than I’ll ever use in a year, and he got the double-minute yearly plan for $140. Plus I “recommended” him when we signed up, so we both got bonus minutes, and the phones come with promo codes for extra minutes with each new airtime card you buy, good for 2 years.)
I didn’t read all of the complaints at the linked page but it sounds like pretty typical Tracfone. I had a horrible experience with them which I’ve recounted on the boards previously. In a nutshell, I never got the manual that’s supposed to be in the box so the first time I travelled out of my area (roaming) I didn’t know I had to punch in some special code for the phone to work. So I ended up trapped in the Denver airport without a working phone and unable to reach my brother who was waiting to pick me up. The phone, however, bled about 10 minutes for the attempts I made trying to reach someone. Tracfone refused to reimburse me for the time because it supposedly wasn’t their fault I didn’t get the manual and because I didn’t call them at the time I was having the problem. How I was supposed to call them with a non-functioning phone and without the phone number which was included in the manual remains to this day a mystery.
So, yeah, Tracfone sucks gigantic donkey balls, their customer service is vindictive and stupid and they are just generally overall evil fuckers. Find anyone else.
I’ve got the Virgin phone and really like it. I’ve used it all over the place, Florida, California, New York and here in the DC area without any real problems. You do pay for the phone, and then $20 every 90 days no matter what. I think it comes out to around $80 a year. I’ve had mine for a bit more then a year and have over $50 on it so you can see how much I really use it. I really like it though, much cheaper in the end then the $40 a month I had with Verizon.
I also used British Virgin when I was in Europe last summer and it worked great in every country I was in, even as far east as Romania. I just wish the US Virgin would work over there and I’d be really happy.
Scarlett, that idea of using an old cellphone is interesting. The only concern i would have is that i would like to be able to test it, but the only way to do that would be to actually call 911, and there’s no way i’m going to do that in a non-emergency situation.
I’ve been reading some of the consumer complaints about Tracfone, and one reasonably common concern is that buying a X number of units does NOT always seem to equate to buying X minutes. Some people say that a 3 minute conversation will use up to 15 or 20 units, which runs the phone down much more quickly than they anticipated. Here’s one example of what i’m talking about.
This probably wouldn’t be an issue for us because, as i said, we really only want it for emergencies. But still, i don’t like the idea of being scammed. Has anyone had this problem?
So, that $20 that you have top add every 90 days: is that a charge that only keeps the phone activated, or does that $20 actually add to your speaking minutes?
For example, if i add $20 every three months, and don’t use the phone at all, will i have $80 worth of talking time after 1 year, or $0 worth of talking time? Because if you get $80 worth of talking time for paying $80 a year, that seems pretty good. I just looked on the Virgin website, and they charge 0.25c a minute for the first ten minutes a day, then 10c a minute after that. Even at the higher rate, $80 a year would be over 5 hours of talk time, and there’s no way we’re ever going to use all of that.
Virgin costs .25/minute for the first 10 minutes of the day and then a dime for each additional minute. It’s a dime to send a text message, free to receive. The phone comes with $10 and you get $5 if you register your credit card on their website for auto top-ups, which I haven’t done so I don’t know if there’s a catch. Caller ID, call waiting, and voice mail are included, but you’re charged airtime to check your VM, which sucks.
I used to have Virgin, but I had serious problems getting a signal at school. Since this is when I need the phone, I got a refurbished phone from AT&T (now Cingular) for about 10 bucks. The plan I have costs just under $40 for 200 minutes, and it’s automatically debited from my account. I get a text message when I’m down to a certain balance, then they take their money. I don’t have a contract, and I like not having to worry about buying more time. It just happens.
After having a tire blowout on at 70-mph on the I-40 the week before my company NexTel was to be taken away, and after hearing Paul Harvey (of all folks) advertise them, I bought a Nokia 2600 TracFone and 200 minutes (including initial bonus time) 6 weeks ago to use only for outgoing emergency and out of office/out of home calling. Paid about $50 for phone and about $40 for a prepaid minutes card.
I called the TracFone customer service center on a land line to go thru the incredibly involved procedure for registering and putting time on it. The rep had to repeat most everything several times so I so could get thru her subcontinental India area accent, though when I asked where she was, she said “Miami, Fla.” Several 20+ digit numbers have to be read by the rep and then punched in at least twice, depending perhaps on accent interpretation. Oh, and you have to write down the activation number off a chip that you insert into the phone before you insert the battery (which covers it from view).
Having read the complaint threads and links (which date from 2002-2003) I will never give them my credit card number. You can buy prepaid time cards from many retail outlets, e.g., K-Mart. I suspect they may have cleaned up their act. After all, Paul Harvey touts them.
I keep ithe phone “off” in my pocket and have had to recharge the battery only once, after I inadvertently left it “on” in standby mode all day.
Their data sheet says it costs about 47 cents per minute. Obviously that depends on how much or if you use it. The display on the phone tells me every time I turn it on that my activation period (but not my unused “units”) expires on June 4. I have to buy more “units” before then or the phone number dies and when I reactivate I get a new number (for the same phone). I’m sure there are more detail about the “plan” that have devils in them and there are more features available on the unit/service than I will ever know about or figure out, let alone use.
I’m happy with it, but would need to remember to recharge the batt if I were to keep it “on” to use it for incoming calls. (duh-sorry, but it’s my first cell phone.)
I’ve had Tracfone, Simple Freedom, and Virgin. Tracfone wasn’t bad, but the problem I had with it was that if I went out of state I was charged for roaming. Simple Freedom just plain sucked. It had one nice feature and that was before you made a call, it would tell you how many minutes you had left. The problem I ran into was that if you recharged your airtime, before you ran out of minutes, their computer would get all confused and you’d end up with fewer minutes than you should have had. Currently, I’ve got Virgin, and the only problem I’ve had with it is that it doesn’t work in most of Kansas! Virgin uses Sprint PCS’s network, so if there’s Sprint coverage, you’ve got coverage.
I love my Virgin mobile phone. I only use it for calling my fiance occasionally from work if I need a ride, or emergencies. 20 bucks minimum every 90 days, and that’s all it ever costs me, cause that’s how little I actually use it. I just had to top-up with 20 bucks cause it had been 90 days, and I still had 11 bucks and change left over from the last 90 days. The minutes roll over too.
I’ve heard support people are trained to say they’re somewhere in the US even when they’re not, because of complaints about outsourced workers/heavy or not understandable accents in tech support.
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