That’s not accurate. It may be the case for you, since you buy cards with 90 days of service every 3 months. But they offer cards with up to a year of service, buying additional cards (of whatever value) simply adds to the service time, and you don’t have to “renew” until the service time you have purchased runs out.
Also Trac Fone has a couple of services that add time or days automatically.
I don’t know if the automatic minutes will double or not, though.
TracFones are best for people who don’t use the phone constantly. My husband and I use our TracFones mainly to keep in touch with each other when we’re supposed to meet somewhere, and because he travels a lot, though most of our yakking when he travels is through a land line. I like the convienience of it. Whether I’m paying 9 cents a minute or 25 doesn’t matter because I don’t use that many minutes, and I like NOT having to pay a monthly bill.
If you were to get a TracFone, sign up for their e-mail offers. They’re easy enough to delete when you’re not interested, but nice when something special comes along. For instance, there was a Mother’s Day special I found out about via e-mail where they offered the 400 minute card ($99) with 200 bonus minutes! Normally when they offer “bonus minutes” it’s something like 20 or 50. 200 was a big deal. I took advantage of the special because I didn’t just get 600 minutes. Snce I have a Double Minutes phone I got 1200 minutes for $99.00. That might be…what, 12 cents a minute? but they’re going to last me for many months. The bonus is that I extended my service time and won’t have to buy any more minutes until December 2009.
TracFones aren’t for everybody, and for certain people they’d be a horrific money sink, but for someone like me, a person with terrible credit who just wanted a utility phone, it’s perfect.
I do wish I’d waited a bit. I wanted a camera phone but TracFone didn’t offer one. Now they do. Ah well, I still love my Motorola W370, but if I were buying one now I’d probably get either the LG225 or, more likely, the Motorola W376g. Both are flip phones (as is my W370) which is important to me. I hate candy bar phones. Not that I don’t lust after an iPhone, but no way am I going to kiss AT&T’s butt and pay their outrageous prices.
What reason do most people have for owning a cell phone? They may claim they “need” it but a decade or two decades ago very few people needed them.
More like 8 cents a minute ($99/1200). Wow, wish I’d caught that one.
I think Trac Fone’s motto should be, “The cell phone for people who don’t really want a cell phone.”
For everybody who uses cell phones, I found this via amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/seller/home.html?ie=UTF8&seller=A3CTI4SHTVAILM
They have some dirt cheap accessories. I found a replacement battery there (belatedly; see below) for about $5.
One thing, which I posted elsewhere: I was looking for a batt for my C261. I was finding them for $30, which was insane b/c I only paid $40 for the whole phone. I did a really dumb thing: I ordered a different trac fone. Thing is, the double minutes card is only for the phone you have. So I sent it back…about $25 in S/H down the drain. 
Morals to the story:
-
If you want to get a Trac Fone, plan to get the one you’ll be happy with for years. “Upgrading” later carries a price. I’m discovering, as in the quote, that I’m not thrilled with candy bar style but too late. OTOH I have a camera phone, a feature which I rarely use.
-
Make sure it will store your address book on the SIM card. I think if mine dies, I’ll be able to take out the SIM and put it in the next phone, not have to re-enter numbers. Had I realized I could do this with my existing phone, I wouldn’t have ordered a new one in the first place.
Well, technically, they do “expire”. If I bought 300 minutes today, June 18th, and didn’t use them up, and failed to add more by July 18th, the minutes I didn’t use this month would expire. But if I add 300 minutes today, only use 150 of them, then add 300 more on July 18th (or before), I’d then have 450 minutes. So they only expire if you just stop adding minutes.
They have 600 minute cards ($60.00, duh) that last for 60 days and 900 minute cards that will last for 90 days.
For about a month, they actually offered a 150 minute card for $15.00 that lasted for 30 days, but I guess they didn’t make enough money on that. . . rats! It was perfect for me!
I was shamed into it. I always thought they were toys; I’m not some business mogul who needs to get that critical call from his stockbroker while I’m in the frozen foods at the market. What is so important that it can’t wait?
But I sometimes drive home (900 miles away) and the fam was scared I’d have car trouble and need help. They bugged me. So ok, got a Trac Fone.
I pointed out to them later, “You remember back in about 1973, that year we drove to Colorado for vacation? 1000 miles. No cell phone. Not even a CB radio. We made it there, made it back, no problem. I guess if I had a breakdown today, with no cell, I’d walk a mile or two to the next exit, or a motorist might stop to help or at least use their cell to call for help. Or there are sometimes call boxes. Police might even be driving by. There could be a house near the road. And after all, it’s mostly interstate driving so there’s lots of traffic…”
Other than that, I’d be screwed!
But in Texas, it serves the purpose of making “in state but long distance” calls cheaper than a landline.
One thing people have mentioned in other threads is that pay phones are not as commonplace as they were 10 or 20 years ago. And I was not a particularly involved or social 13 year old but I used pay phones all the time to call home.
I say get the cheapest phone you can, tell him that if he breaks it then he’s doing yard-work until he can buy a new one. 13 is old enough to take care of your own stuff.
To keep in touch. If my husband and I are coming from different places and are meeting at the movie theater, I wanted us to be able to tell each other if we were going to be delayed. Also, I work some late evenings. It’s nice to have a friendly voice to talk to as I’m walking to the “L.”
So what? I don’t deny myself things just because I didn’t have access to or “need” it one or two decades ago. That was then. This is now. In the past I’ve been in plenty of situations where I damn well wish I’d had a cell phone with me at the time. It’s interesting to watch older movies where the entire plot and events would have been different if only the characters had had a cell phone/regular phone/car/any technology that makes life easier.
Future generations will have things that we couldn’t even dream of and they’ll wonder how we ever got along without them. Our being without whatever-it-is shouldn’t mean that they shouldn’t embrace and use whatever cool technology is available to them.
Wow, that sucks. I had a TF that I put through the washing machine. I was hoping for a cleaner signal and…
Well I got a new one and Trac Fone transferred the minutes and days to my new phone for me, gave me the same phone number. Even if I ran out of service days, I don’t think my minutes would expire. In fact, I think I could let mine run out of service days…leave it lying around for a year…and reactivate it. That would be nice for the OP: if the kid uses too many minutes etc. it’s a minimal hassle to start again once he’s saved enough pennies to buy a card.
I guess the key for you, norinew, is to buy an extra card and keep it on hand for when you need to hurry up and add it before expiration? As posted upthread, TF will let you automatically add days if needed, but at that price it’s a ripoff, IMO.
Bottom line on pay-as-you go: If you have a “regular” service like T-Mobile, you might be paying $35/month. That’s $420 per year. For that money on a TF, you can start with the 800 minutes/double minutes for life card for $140. With the remaining $280, you could buy three of the 450 minutes cards (@$80 per) which, when doubled, would give 2700 more minutes. With the $40 left over, you’d have a 200 minute card to add 400 minutes. So you’d get 3900 minutes/1 year + 4 x (90 days), or 2 years. And if you buy when promos are running, you can do better, pick up some extra minutes.
For one year of $35 a month T Mobile, you can have at least 3900 minutes to use in 2 years. Hmm. But, no free weekends etc.
Nah, it turns out the key for me is to put the expiration date of my minutes on my Outlook calendar, a day or two in advance, so I can remember to add airtime, which I can easily do online.
My phone has a display telling me how many minutes I have left and when they expire, but I never think to check it. :smack:
Thanks for all the helpful replies … Yes, it will partly be to allow him to easily keep in touch with me and his mom when he’s out and about. He also has some friends that have changed schools that he wants to keep in touch with. I have absolutely no doubt that there will be a lot of text messaging involved–this is a teenager we’re talking about.
And his younger brother didn’t need the XBox games we bought him for his birthday. :rolleyes: His past birthday presents have all been ‘kid’-style gifts along those lines. He’s crossing a threshhold of sorts this summer; this is something that will represent that in his mind that I know he’ll also get a lot of use out of …
The least expensive option will be to get a phone sharing minutes on your family plan -usually about 10.00 per month . Minute costs etc will typically (not always) be substantially less than with any prepaid. The problem is to get the deal where you pay little or nothing for the phone you usually have to sign up for some 2 year contract. and you probably will want a 10.00 extra unlimited texting package so $ 20.00 per month is probably the nut. If you can get prepaid for less than that it might be better way to go.
As a last note bear in mind with a standard non-prepaid plan that the cheap price you pay for the phone on the front end is a heavily discounted deal for getting the phone and contract. If his phone breaks or is lost it might easily cost 100 - 200 + to get an off plan replacement. Plans do offer loss & breakage insurance. With a 13 year old that might not be a bad option.
Maybe my point wasn’t clear. The kid doesn’t need one nor does anyone else really, so what exactly is the big deal if the kid wants one.
I’d go with something durable, perhaps a flip-phone, something that protects the internal display when closed, I had one of those Samsung Slider phones with the main display on the outside of the phone, one day I absentmindedly dropped it in my pocket with my car keys…
lets just say that the keys created a “pressure point” on the main display and it ended up catastrophically failing (yep, the screen cracked), and since screen breakage is not covered under warranty, I had to get a replacement phone at full price…
thankfully one of my co-workers kindly gave me his old Motorola Razr 3XX (Gray), he upgraded to an iPhone, and the Razr was a spare phone, I simply swapped SIM cards and was back up and running
The nice thing about the Razr is that the main display is protected when the phone is closed
I’d reccomend a flip phone, maybe one of those “ruggedized” flip phones with the heavy rubber casing and overbuilt construction, something designed for hard use and abuse
Yesterday, I actually had to send a text. It cost .3 units, not .5. I received one; same deal. So effectively, if you’re getting your minutes at ten cents per, it’s 3 cents to send or receive a text with Trac Fone.
And while I’m at it, my phone (Motorola C261) takes pictures. I email them to myself from the phone, which costs 1-2 units. I can also receive them from my computer, emailing them to my phone. The pics taken with the phone aren’t spectacular, but what do you expect for $40?
My brother the construction manager gripped when we gave him his new cellphone (a Christmas present) because he didn’t like the flip-over lid, plus apparently some genius has decided that Nokias aren’t cool.
He’s in love with it now, having already stepped on it at least twice in his workboots: three of his previous cellphones died that way.
Sorry about that. I had put you in the “None” camp. That’s the kind of thing you often hear, that people didn’t “need” cell phones back in the day so why do they “need” one now, as if one generation not having [insert useful technology] is at all pertinent to another generation who does have [insert useful technology].
Oooh, I just bought my husband some minutes by going to the TracFone website. There is a similar special going on. A 400 minute card for $99.00, but put in the promo code 51729 and get 200 bonus minutes. The 400 were doubled (he has the same phone I do) but it looks like they didn’t double the bonus minutes for him. It was easy to tell because he only had 30odd minutes left a couple days ago, and now has just over 1000. Maybe they didn’t double mine either. I still had a couple/few hundred minutes so I didn’t really notice. Still, 200 bonus minutes is not a bad deal, even if it’s slightly more than 9 cents a minute. The total cost came to something like $108.00 with taxes. Plus it added a year of service.
The special ends soon so take advantage asap if you’re going to.
Both my kids have cellphones - and have since the younger one was six.
They are on our plan, the cellphones are clamshell types and could be chosen from a very limited range, but were free.
For a base rate of about 15 dollars a month the kids can call and receive calls and texts only from the numbers we programme into them (we hold the passwords).
If the cellphone is switched off or the battery case is opened, if it is broken or a ring pulled out, it will call our phones repeatedly till we deal with it. They also have GPS.
We don’t live in the US but in Japan, where kids are expected to go to school and study alone from first grade. My kids don’t take their phones to school but they do take them out at the weekends. It means I can send them off and know I can keep tabs on them wherever they are and I let them go to places and for longer than I’d let them with no method of contacting them.
13 is certainly not too young for a cellphone and I can see it having real use in allowing the boy more freedom than he’s had up till now with a safety net in place.
Both my boys phones are VERY beaten up, so yes, a clamshell style with simple clean lines and nothing too plasticky! I am thinking back to my teen years though, and was always disappointed with my parents choices of cassette players, watches and the like (though I never ever said so to them) so it might be better to let him choose for himself. If he’s been dreaming of the cellphone he’d get if only he was allowed, he’ll be thrilled to get what he wants, or the nearest acceptable version!