Below are tips we’ve gathered to help you and your mobile save money. It focuses not only on picking the right plan and sticking to it, but also dealing with that long list of charges you find in your mailbox every month.
Are you paying extra for 3-way calling? How about call-waiting or carrier-based phone insurance?
Knowing the answers to these questions is essential to understanding your cell phone bill. As carriers struggle to raise profits, they add more and more unnecessary features to their customers’ billing cycles, raising the cost of service so that your bills get larger and larger and their pockets become fatter and fatter. The solution is to look at your cell phone bill carefully and to contact your carrier if there’s anything you think is on there that shouldn’t be.
For some, the best chance to have a bill you can control is to move toward Pre-Paid cell phone services like NET10. With their easy-to-understand packages, pre-paid services like NET10 might be exactly what you’re looking for. Click here for more information.
Many cell phone owners are unsatisfied with the ringtone options that they find on their newly purchased cell phones. There are a couple ways to change or add new tones to any phone but beware! Purchasing ringtones is possibly the worst imaginable way to spend your hard-earned money! The average ringtone is at most 30 seconds of a song that costs nearly $3.00. It’s very likely that you can purchase the entire song (all 3.5 minutes of it) from iTunes, Amazon.com or some other online retailer for less than $1.00!
There are many free programs out there in order to turn that song into a ringtone you can consult your favourite search engine. Look for “mp3 ringtone conversion” or “iTunes ringtone conversion” and your screen will be blessed with links that will show you how to make your own ringtones for free.
One of the best ways to save minutes (and money) on a cell phone plan is to coordinate with the people you talk to the most. Many cell phone carriers have great options for people who are in constant contact with one another. They include mobile to mobile minutes, family plans and “favorites” plans.
Do you text a little? Or do you text a lot? Depending on your answer, you might want to look into an unlimited text plan with your carrier. Normally, without a plan, carriers charge as much as between 5 and 10 cents per text message, without taking care to see whether or not you sent the message, or were on the receiving end. $0.05 might seem like nothing to worry about at the outset but it adds up. If you were to send and receive just one message a day at that rate, your bill is not only pushed up $3.00, but you’re left paying taxes on that extra $3.00. Depending on your state and local cell phone taxes, those couple messages a day may have just added $2.00 in taxes to your bill. That’s $5.00! That seems crazy when the average nationwide text message plan allows you 200-300 messages for $5.00 or 1000-unlimited messages for $10-15.00.
Woah! How did we get to $15.00 for text messaging?! The fact is, it all adds up, which is why, again, you need to gage your usage. For some people, text messaging isn’t a factor of life at all—it’s something they can completely do without. If you fit that bill, calling your phone company and telling them to disable your phone from receiving text messages can help you save some coin by avoiding being charged for messages you can’t control.
For those of you who can’t live without the feature, talk to your carrier about a specific text-message plan. Sometimes you can roll text messaging into a family or group plan, which can really cut costs. Don’t suffer through the month trying to count your text messages!
Data plans are a little different than text messaging plans because there are few choices between unlimited or nothing at all. If you’re moving from a normal flip phone to a new smart phone that has GPS along with all sorts of online applications, email access, and other internet-enabled bells and whistles, you should expect to pay as much as $40.00 extra to your phone carrier at the end of the month than you to already. If you’re really trying to keep your costs down, it’s important to determine whether or not you need an internet enabled phone. They sure do come with advantages but make no mistake, those advantages will cost you twice what a normal cell phone bill will.
With text-message services like “Googl,” which send free 411 listings to your phone in the form of a text message, perhaps taking advantage of your carrier’s unlimited text plan might be in your best interests. You should also talk to you carrier about the costs of data when working with a family plan—it might be available at a greatly reduced price.
When most people sign up with cell phone carriers, they’re offered plans that include 200-300 peak-time minutes for around $30.00 a month, 450-500 peak-time minutes for around $40.00 a month, and 1000 peak-time minutes for around $60.00 a month. The problem here is that the numbers are confusing. Honestly, who in their right mind thinks of minutes in terms of numbers above 60?
No one, that’s who. To give you an idea, however, we’ve broken it down in the table below:
| CELL PHONE MINUTES | ACTUAL HOURS |
| 250-300 | 4+ hrs - 5 hrs |
| 450-500 | 7.5 hours – 8 hrs, 15 m |
| 1000 | 16 hours, 40 minutes |
If you’re like the average American and hold a job between the hours of 9am and 5pm, you may not need 16 hours per month of peak minutes on your phone in order to make phone calls between the time you leave the office and the time your free nightly minutes kick in. If you can live with just half that 16hrs between work and your nightly minutes begin, at around 8hrs, you might be able to save as much as $20.00 per month of your phone bill. And if you can live with even less, 4-5 hours of peak minutes, your savings can go even further!
It’s important to note that these savings only work for people who have the self-control to not go over their minutes. Most cell phone carriers charge 50¢ for every minute the user talks over their plan’s allotted time, leaving that user in hot water if they talk longer than their plan allows.
The solution is to track your minutes. Most carriers allow users to call into their customer service centers (usually number 611 on your cell phone) and check out how many minutes they have spoken so far, and how many they have remaining for the month. Keeping track of your talk-time will allow you to determine if indeed you can take advantage of a cheaper plan with less peak-time minutes.
Losing your cell phone (or having it stolen) can turn out to be a financial hardship as well as a strain on the wallet. In addition to having to pay for a new cell phone, you’re going to have to go through the stress of getting all of the numbers in your phone book back, which is a pain.
One thing that victims of cell phone loss and theft don’t realize is the financial burden they are at risk to if their phones are put to use by thieves or opportunists who find that phone. Unless you report that your phone is missing or stolen, these people can make international calls or simply use your phone until they’ve finished your minutes and are running up your bill to the tune of 50¢ a minute for as long as they’d like to talk.
You need to understand that unless you report a lost or stolen phone to your carrier, you’re going to have to pay for all the time/minutes that might get charged to it by thieves or other bad people who would abuse a lost phone.
One way of mitigating the chance that your lost or stolen phone will be abused is to set a security code. If you have a phone that you can set a security code onto, then you should set that up so would be phone abusers will have no access to your phone service.
Another option would be to move to a pre-paid plan. With pre-pay, people who abuse lost or stolen phones can’t rack up charges in excess of the time already paid for on the phone. They also need a code in order to add more time which means that even if you don’t notice your phone’s gone at first, and don’t report it immediately, the damage you can suffer is severely limited compared to what it would be for those using conventional plans.
Whether you’re calling someone or receiving a call, when you’re on your cell phone you’re always paying for the minutes. This means that 1-800, 1-866 and other ‘Toll Free’ numbers are the same as every other number in the country as far as your wallet’s concerned. Remember that there’s no discount for calling these numbers, so keep these calls as brief as you would any other phone call.
411 is a great service but it’s an expensive one. The average 411 service call is $1.00 per number, and you have to pay tax on that service. If you use 411 once a weekend in any given month, your cell phone bill can rise by as much as $5.00 a month. That adds up. There are a couple ways to get around using your carrier’s 411 services.
Wireless carriers like AT&T and Verizon advertise that they can lower your costs by selling you cell phone, high-speed home internet, and Cable TV service for a cost that’s less than each one of the services separately. Be careful about these plans. Often times the rate for the combined services is low for the first three months or so and then goes up after the ‘trial’ period is complete. This can leave you paying more for each of the services which means that you’re paying more for your cell phone bill than you need to.
The key to lowering you phone bill (or any service bill) is to understand the costs involved in the service, and then to downsize your use of that service to a level that suits your needs. Learning the difference between what you need out of a cell phone, and what you think you need out of a cell phone is the real challenge.
Lots of people find that they have no need for cell phones that are linked to two-year service contracts or that they don’t use their cell phones enough to justify $50 dollars (or more) per month on a conventional cell phone plan. For these people, the pre-paid phone plan might very well be the best option. Plenty of cell phone carriers like NET10 allow you to pay for only the minutes you use, without locking you into complicate contracts that leave you paying for features you don’t want—saving consumers both stress and money.
