About three months ago, Marcie and I decided to drop our land line in favor of our cell phones; Marcie was in full agreement then. Now, she is doing a 180 and wants to drop our cell phones in favor of another land line. For emergency use, she wants to buy two of these pay-as-you-go cell phones or these prepaid cell phones. She is especially interested in this Jitterbug phone because it “gives you just the basics.” I like having our current cell phones and don’t particularly want another land line. We are actually having our first real fall out over this issue so it isn’t trivial. Anyway, I need opinions and/or anecdotal stories about the Jitterbug and other prepaid cell phones.
The Jitterbug is a ripoff as far as how much they charge you for the services you get, and you get screwed on the price of the phone. Stay away from that, they target a specific audience because they are traditionally uninformed on technological things.
I used a Go phone during the U.S. elections without a hitch. Downside was the prepaid phone cards you had to buy had an expiration date, so the minutes were truly “use 'em or lose 'em”. I think they expired in 30-60 days or something like that.
I bought a cheap t-mobile phone afew years back, add minutes frm time to time (probably spend 75$ per year on it) it gets used for emergencies, travel,convenience /ease for certain important people tocall me. Bought my husband one, too las year, he rarely uses it (usually to contact me when were both out) he adds 20 minutes every so often- his bigger issue is that since heamos never uses it, his minutes run out vs being used.
I find that folks who are cell phone mainl users ted to calll your cell numbe first, w/o considering "are they likely to be at home or work’
We’re with T-Mobile but we have Motorola* phones; I needed a good phone when we bought them because of the work I was doing. We initially had a plan whereby we got something like 900 minutes per month for the two of us; we never came close to using that many minutes so after I was unable to work, we cut it down to 500 minutes. My wife decided to retire right after I became disabled and she promptly began making phone calls all over the USA to various Govt Agencies; she worked for the VA. Anyway, she managed to exceed the 500 minute limit by about a jillion minutes and we were hit with a staggering phone bill—something on the order of $275.00; she has been on this kill the cell phone kick ever since. I haven’t been able to convince her as yet. She has ADHD and PTSD and stubborn doesn’t even begin to describe her.
*I don’t know the model and I can’t seem to locate the book.
I put off getting a cellphone for as long as possible, but when I finally decided to bite the bullet, I looked at a prepaid plan. I decided on a Cingular/AT&T plan. It seemed to fit my usage well. I don’t use my cell everyday, and that is a big factor. One aspect I liked is that, though the lower prepay amounts (under $100) have kind of short time limits, if you recharge before the limit expires, the balance is carried forward to the next time block. So you don’t really lose the “old” balance. Not all the plans offered this (at the time).
Another factor was in talking to friends/co-workers, everyone seemed pretty pleased with AT&T’s coverage. Whereas others were not as pleased with some of the other providers. But this will depend on your location and how much you travel (and to where).
Bottomline is that I’ve been pretty pleased with my AT&T prepay plan, and would recommend at least investigating it.
I assume that this painful bill is the reason Marcie wants to minimize cell phone use and get a land line. If so, I respectfully suggest that this is not the only way to prevent the recurrence of such a bill. A prepaid phone can work well for normal everyday use with no risk of exceeding some limit and thus incurring “penalty rate” charges.
As you’ve seen, the problem with typical monthly plans is striking a balance between paying for more than you normally use and using more than is allotted. These plans can work nicely for those who have consistent regular usage, but are problematic for those whose usage does, or can, vary significantly from time to time.
The problem with prepaid systems is that if you run out of minutes or service time, the phone stops working. This can be easily avoided, but does require awareness of where you stand and the occasional (slight) bother of adding minutes/service as necessary. Some folks find this easy to deal with, others will find it troublesome.
One way to look at it is in comparison to a checking account: monthly is like having overdraft protection that will pay the check but charge a high fee for doing so; prepaid is like having the purchase refused if your balance is exceeded.
I suggest go to tracfone.com and explore what they offer (note that the phones available and the particular phone-purchase packages vary over time). If going this route, one should get a “double minutes for life” card (buy it separately if it’s not packaged with the phone) and a year of service time (with a bunch of minutes). Look at it from the perspective of one year’s use. If you expect to use more minutes than included in the preceding, figure the cost for that as well. It’s simple arithmetic to convert this to a monthly cost, which can be compared to land lines and typical monthly cell plans. This exercise may help you decide on the best option for you.
The nice thing about prepaid is the flexibility. You can add usage minutes and/or service time if and when you need it. There’s not a risk of extra-high fees for exceeding an allotment. The risk is running out of actual use of the phone - but that is easy (for most folks) to avoid.
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Gary T** said just about everything I was going to, but I wanted to point out that you can usually find out the model of the phone by looking at either the battery or the portion of the phone it hides.
Try finding a plan that will give you unlimited minutes and is prepaid. Currently, with MobiPCS (a company here in Hawaii only) I pay $50 bucks a month for unlimited anytime minutes, long distance, texting, etc… for a few bucks more a month there are other features like unlimited directory assistance (which is pointless now because google offers free 411 1-800-GOOG-411) but ya…
There are services out there that are prepaid unlimited. Try staying away from pay as you go. They are usually a rip off (over-priced per minute fee’s).
Check to see if you signed a 1 or 2 year contract with TMobil, the early cancellation fee can be very expensive. I think it cost me $225. to cut my ties with Sprint.
If you change carriers, probably not. If you don’t change carriers (most of the majors also offer pre-paid plans), you might, but ask first. You need to weigh the importance of keeping your current numbers versus cost.
If your use is that disparate, you might also think about a family plan where you both draw from a pool of minutes; she can use the minutes you don’t and vice versa. If you’re currently under contract, you’ll probably have a cancellation fee to get out of it.
That being said, I have AT&T’s pay-as-you-go. The bill is deducted from my checking account once a month, but I can add more time as I need to. I find it a good balance, if a bit costly. I pay for the time I use, period. As long as the bill gets paid, I don’t have to worry about minutes expiring.
Sometimes the emergency calls are not 9-1-1 emergencies. Sometimes they’re the call to AAA to come tow the car to the garage followed by the call to some person to pick you up from the garage and take you somewhere else. You need service for those.
I also have Virgin Mobile - required to buy $20/quarter, but minutes don’t expire, they accumulate. I think I end up spending about $100/year. (wring is right. People who use their cell phones call me on mine - even when I’m home with the land line right there.) Service is pretty good as long as I’m in a populated area. I got no service at all while vacationing in Alaska and I wouldn’t drive across country with this phone. But it works for my “emergencies.”
Tracfone. Basic phone for $20 + $30 double minutes for life card + $20 60 minute card will give you 3 months of service and 120 minutes for $70. Then after that you can spend $20 every 3 months and get 120 min each time. It works out to less than $7 per month. The phone works on the Verizon network around here, so my coverage is better than people with Sprint or Alltel around here. All for about 1/5 the price.
If you want some bonus minutes search for “tracfone bonus codes” on Google. You can often get at least 20 minutes more that way. However, if you add the minutes and bonus code on the Tracfone web site there’s a catch. If your code doesn’t work, try it one more time, but don’t try it three times because the third time it won’t warn you if the code wasn’t valid. You can start over though and keep trying new codes.