It's time for a quick post. Nothing earth shattering here... Just another attempt to cut costs in my household and I'm exciting about my new "find". We cancelled our home phone a while back. (We use "dry loop" DSL-only for our Internet connection which costs about $30 / month.) We do not have cable. My husband and I each carry a cell phone with unlimited data coverage and a shared minute pool and we have an extra phone on this plan for my mother in law to use in case of an emergency. We use Verizon because the coverage is so great in our neighborhood, and it's also good in all of the rural areas that we travel to frequently. All of our family is on Verizon and we like the "free" mobile-to-mobile concept.
Anyway, our bills have been gradually getting out of control. Like $185 / month for these 3 phones! And we don't really even come near our cap of 1400 shared minutes with the nights and weekends and mobile to mobile. I have to pay 10 cents for each text message and seems like people are texting with greater frequency just to say "hello" and this has been racking up. The monthly fee for standard service is expensive. The additional data for the two of us is $60 more... So I've been researching a ton and have finally decided to go with a prepaid service. I decided on Page Plus Cellular. It is run on the Verizon network, so our smart phones will still work, email still works, and everything is basically the same as before. We can keep our existing Verizon phones and our same phone number and port in for free, with no activation costs. All I needed to do was to pay for the first PIN card with my credit card, and will have to do this every month (or get set up on the automatic renewal, which I plan to do soon.) The best part about all of this...? I put my husband and myself on a $29.95 / month plan that includes 1200 minutes of talk, 3000 texts, and 250 MB of data. I'm in the process of setting up my mother in law with a $10 card with 100 minutes that will last for 120 days and I'll fill her up every 4 months. This strategy is going to save us over $110 a month, for a total of less than $60 per month plus the ~ $3.00 monthly average for my mother in law. And now I can accept text messages without worry. I'm loving this new set up and just wanted to put it out there. It had never even occurred to me that prepaid wireless was a viable option until last week.
What about you? How many cell phones are in your family and are you happy with how things are going?
Oh my goodness, you couldn't have posted this at a better time! I just paid our LATE Verizon bill about a half hour ago. They were calling and texting my husband incessantly. I too, think our cell phone bill is a bit high. We pay over $100 per month and really don't talk on them much. My husband says he doesn't know why he even has one. But this new deal you talk of, sounds very interesting and I've got to look at it now. I would love to cut some costs in our household - and that could be one of them. (I'd love to get rid of cable but our internet is on them too) Thanks for posting this..
ReplyDeleteWell, I ran this past the husband and he didn't even budge... I suck at selling.
ReplyDeleteAh, well timing is everything! My husband also was not keen on the idea.. however... I know our phones are on the fritz and need to be replaced. So, I switched MY phone over first, to "test it out". Next I told him I was switching his (a week later) ... he was very mad at me at the time, (probably because his phone temporarily stopped working while he was using it, ;-) but he got over it pretty quickly.
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