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Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Frugal cellphones. . . .

I've been waiting months and months for my Verizon Wireless contract to end---I'm only two weeks away from freedom, and I couldn't help but go out and purchase my next cellphone, which will use Virgin Mobile service.

I've been checking the reviews about the phone itself (the 'Super Slice') for months as well, and I'm confident that it will be worth the money. The phone was listed at $49.99 (which is about $49.99 more than I usually pay for a cell phone). However, when I went to check out, it turned out that my particular phone was on sale---so I got it for $29.99!

The new "pay as you go" service that I just activated will cost me $20 every 90 days (for 100 minutes---luckily, I'm NOT a phone talker---I use my phone for emergencies and to make brief plans, not for chatting). Best of all, Virgin Mobile is currently offering a promotion where I can save even more money. If I load $60 into my Virgin Mobile account in the course of three consecutive days before the end of April, my phone will stay active for an entire year, without my having to load any additional minutes (unless I use all of the 300 minutes that will come with the $60, which is doubtful).

I was paying roughly $40 per month for my Verizon service---a complete waste of money. Two months ago I called and asked for a lower priced plan (which was, of course, NOT advertised on the Verizon website at all), so recently I've been paying about $23 a month for 50 'free' minutes, of which I generally used about half.

So, at $60 a year with Virgin Mobile, I'll average a whopping $5.00 a month for phone service. Even adding in the cost of my phone ($29.00 + $60.00 = $7.50 per month) I'm saving money!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Saw this and wanted to add in what I have done with these crazy cell phone bills. I need to have a phone with me from time to time, so I opted for a t-mobile phone that I bought at Walmart. The phone itself was $29.95. I then added 1,000 mins at a cost of $100. That 1000 mins lasts me for the year. I've just renewed the 1,000 mins after my year was up and ended up carrying over about 100 mins from last year. Works out to be about $9 per month for the 1000 mins for the year (about 85 mins per month). What I also do to not run down the mins is to use the txting feature from time to time. It gets the message across and keeps me from yacking on the phone.

Leonard

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