More than two years ago I went out on a whim, having just recently moved, to buy a cellular phone. I got what at the time seemed the simplest, cheapest model and plan.
I’ve had no problems with it, buy money is really, really tight. I long ago did away with the Inter net function because it was unnecessary and expensive, and now I pay a nickle for all the text messages on top of the monthly price. But I only use it as a phone - no camera, no music, no nothing else. I never even use any of my rollover minutes - they just pile up to about 1,000 and vanish off the end.
I’m paying, with added nickles, something between $50-$55 a month to Cingular. This is starting to seem really excessive to me. Am I totally overpaying? Any suggestions on maybe renegotiating or going to another service?
Er. Well, looking at my number online I’m not going to add up the texts - more than I thought, but I don’t do it constantly like kids do.
As for minutes, for this month I’m at about 130/450 anytime minutes; 210/ 5,000 night and weekend minutes (though I did talk to my buddy for a good hour or so last night, which probably hasn’t been added in yet.) I have about 2,100 rollover minutes piled up, some of which will vanish in a few days.
This is a really good free site that lists all the plans, lets you input your usage, even tells how many bars to expect from each carrier in your area.
The one tricky part is that it’s hard to calculate the effect of the funny fringe benefits like free weekends or free calls to five numbers. Or the value of rollover.
But it’s a great place to start shopping http://www.billshrink.com/cell-phones/start.html
If you hardly use any minutes at all, you can keep a prepaid phone active for maybe $10 a month (you do have to put money on it occasionally because unused minutes do expire eventually.)
I was going to suggest TracFone, it’s effectively $7 a month for like 45 minutes of talk time per month, but that wouldn’t be enough minutes for the OP.
You always have the option of calling Cingular and saying you’d like to cancel because your cell phone is too expensive, I’ve heard of people getting deals for $20 or $25 per month.
On standard, non-prepaid plans, text packages by themselves are between $10-20 and the taxes and fees on a phone usually amounts to 7- 10. by itself before the base plan costs are rung in. I don't think you can get a phone with an unlimited text plan for much less than about 40 bucks a month all in. Second and third phones on a typical plan can be had (sans text) for as little as 10.00 a month but not the primary phone.
Another thing to consider is getting added onto someone else’s plan. The cell phone companies seems to want at least $40 a month for the primary account but will add others to the account for much less.
If you can find a friend or family member with a Verizon cell phone, they can add you on for $10 a month, that gets you into their shared pool of minutes. I think my fair share is about 200 minutes or so a month. $10 a month doesn’t include text messages, I think they’re 20 cents each. But for another $5 a month you can send 250 text/picture/voice messages. So $15 a month isn’t bad, and I feel like I can actually use my phone a bit rather than just use it for emergencies like a TracFone.
Shared plans ARE excellent. There’s 5 of us on my mom’s plan, which does include a 10% discount via her work. We take the total and split it by 5 each month and we all pay about $30 each.
We only share 1000 minutes, but we’ve got free nights & weekends, unlimited text, and “My Circle” (Alltel). With all those features, we’ve never ever gone over the 1000 mins - and my SIL is on the phone all day and all night with her sisters (they’re in our circle!)
Yep, the Verizon plan is similar, free nights and weekends (nights start at 9PM, weekends start Friday at 9PM), free calls to other Verizon customers, etc. But not unlimited text.
Which brings me to a pet peeve, why are text messages so precious? I know how digital transfers work, 5 seconds of voice conversation probably uses as much bandwidth as 500 text messages. I guess it’s just another thing for cell phone companies to quantify and monetize.
Yeah, that’s a beef (that they charge so much for texts). I guess they do because they can.
Verizon is particularly usurious for texts, at 20 cents apiece to send and to receive. My kids’ prepaid TMobile phones only cost 10 cents to send and 5 to receive. Even with Verizon’s prices, we are usually better off paying for them a la carte (though last month was an exception, we were at an amusement park and texted a LOT).
Re the OP: it’s definitely worth looking into alternatives. Prepaid can be a good deal (my kids use far less than 10 bucks / month on their phones, and it’d cost us that much apiece to add them to our Verizon family plan).
As someone else mentioned, though, the “free weekends” sort of thing can really skew the bill. We use perhaps a third of our monthly minutes in any given month - but a lot of those are evening/weekend minutes anyway so our usage looks even lower. If we have 500 minutes, we use perhaps 200, and perhaps 50 of them are daytime, so it looks like we use only a tenth of our time. Yet if we went to a prepaid plan, they’d all be billed and it might well cost us more than the amount we currently pay on contract.
The prepaid do require regular refreshes. We thought about doing Verizon for that for the kids, but their prepaid minutes expire FAR too soon (a 10 dollar refill dies in 10 day, WTF??). T-Mobile’s 10 dollar refill is good for 3 months and after we put a total of 100 dollars on, they’ll last a full year.
Do you work for a company that has negotiated discounts? My employer has a 17% discount with Verizon. My SO’s employer has a 14%, a friend’s employer gets them 20% off.
So lots of companies have deals like this. Go into a sotre and ask them to check it out for you. It would be free money.
I use Cingular (Well, AT&T now) and they most certainly charge more than 5 cents per text! It’s 20 cents per text incoming or outgoing.
I have the 450/5000 Nationwide plan and I only pay around 46 bucks a month after taxes. I don’t text or use my phone for anything other than talking.
You must be texting a lot more than you realize or somehow got into some odd plan. It’s worth going to their Web site every so often to see what new plans are offered. They’ll sneak in a cheaper one and never tell you about it.
Check out all available packages and see what works best for you. Or, think about switching providers. Do your homework. Some companies are great in certain areas and may suck in others.
One of my nieces just started using Cricket Wireless Internet and loves it. She’s thinking of switching to their wireless phone plan. They also have cell phone plans that seem to have some really good deals. I’m not sure how prolific they are across the country – they’ve just recently gotten out here to my area of IL (Northeast section)…
I’m leery of switching, myself. I started my cellular use with Cellular One many many, years ago and kept with them as they’ve changed hands over the years. I’ve not really had any complaints about them (other that some odd dead spots around where I live) and they’ve always done right by me.
However, if finances dictate, I may have no choice but to either switch or to go with a TracFone.