Teach me! Pay-as-you-go Phones

I really wish we had that around here. That card would cost $30 on Trakfone.

Anyways, I want to mention that, most of the time, when you buy a new phone, it comes with a card or free minutes as a reward. In fact, it’s often cheaper to buy a new prepaid phone than it is to buy separate minutes if there’s any special deal on the phones.

I’ll ‘third’ Net10. In addition to being stupidly easy to use (important to me, because I’m technologically impaired), you can either buy phone cards at Wal Mart, just about any truck stop, and just about any store that sells the phones, or (and this is what I usually do) you can buy minutes online. They even have a service that will automatically add minutes each month (as few as 150 minutes for $15.00, if you don’t use your cell phone much) and then bill your credit or debit card.

The only downside I’ve found to Net10 is that if you have a problem and need to call customer support, it’s amazingly difficult to get to speak to a real human. Then when you do get a real human, odds of them being fluent in English are against. Seems like most of the customer support people I’ve spoken with have two English phrases down pat: “I’m sorry you are having this difficulty” and “Thank you for choosing Net10”. Everything else is, well, hard to understand.