Pre paid phones are great backups and key for planning terrorist attacks!

I have only used pre-paid phones for the last four years. My credit is great, but since we don't use the phones that often it is great to pay $200 a year (for both of us) instead of $50+ every single month. Extra bonus, I never have to worry about going over my limit!

The one downside is you pretty much always have to pay full price for the phone itself if you want anything that can do more than just make a call.

I've been considering getting a Pre-Paid for the reasons listed here, I just don't want something that will automatically renew and become a bill.

Just crunching the quick numbers on Verizon. I pay $70/mo for two lines on the most basic plan (which includes free nights/weekends). $0.20 per text, which we rarely use.

The same thing on prepaid is $60/mo BASE rate ($0.99/day) plus $0.10 a minute all week long. No economies there at all. Both plans do include unlimited calls within the network, though.

Sounds economical if you're a single line with very modest usage, but I can't see it working for 95% of the people I know. I remember doing the math when I signed up (every carrier) and none of the prepaid plans were cheaper.

Plus, what price do you put on the constant self-monitoring of usage? And reconciling your bill? And disputes?

@Ash78:
"Plus, what price do you put on the constant self-monitoring of usage? And reconciling your bill? And disputes?"

Which plan are you referring to here? Seems to apply to both.

We've been doing this for about a year now. I get a cell phone from work, but my wife wanted a phone for on-the-road calls and emergencies. We've saved a lot of money over paying for a contract, but I guess the economies depend upon your usage.

My wife and I use a pre-paid because we don't really use a cell phone that often, and we don't want to sign a contract for some plan that allows us features we'll never use (internet, text, photos, etc.). We've got a uber-basic phone w/ VirginMobile, and it costs us $20 every three months. Minutes roll over, etc. I think it's a great deal.

It's not for everyone, though--but if you don't have a job that requires you to use the cell phone that often, and if you don't care about texting and whatnot, it's worth looking into.

I pay $15 a month for a pre-paid plan with Bell Canada. It's $0.30 for the first two minutes, then $0.05/minute for the rest of the call. It's perfect for me, because I RARELY ever use my phone.

And since I signed up to have my credit card automatically charged each month, I get free voicemail service and call-waiting, call display, and unlimited text messaging. I also don't have to pay an "system access fee", and I'm not bound to any contracts.

The only drawback is that I cannot upgrade my phone for free (like other customers who are on contract) despite the fact that I've been a loyal Bell Mobile customer for 10 years.

I've been thinking about this for emergencies or on the road. I don't have a cell phone because the contracts are outrageously expensive for me and I don't get many calls anyway.

I've thought many times it would be nice to have one just in case.

I've had one for years. It's awesome.

We are light users, maybe 5 minutes per day. Except a few times a year, like when we are traveling, then we use it like crazy. It's still a great deal. Until last year, we weren't even charged tax when we bought minutes through the website.

wooo hooo!!

I've saved $1000s of dollars over the last 5 years. Woo hooo!

Hmm, I didn't know you could port a number to a prepaid... that might tip it for me!

It's an extremely atypical month when I use my cell phone for anything close to an hour, and I rarely text. The phone's invaluable for coordinating schedules, but it's kind of painful each month to see what I'm paying per minute.

I just recently switched from AT&T's $39.99/mo (with after taxes, fees and other stuff normally ended up being ~$54/mo) to their GoPhone plan. I had to opt for the $1-a-day-use fee so I get free calling to other AT&T customers (parents, boyfriend are AT&T).

Unfortunately, immediately after I did this, boyfriend's mom and sister switched to Tmobile and she calls me all the time for the most inane things.

Also, if you do this, ensure you verify fees for using txt messaging. I thought i was getting away with using SMS instead of "using" my phone - but it actually charged me the $1 per day + 10cent SMS fee too. >_<

As a poor loser I can not afford a cell phone, but my wife, a loser by marriage, has a prepaid phone and likes it (so she says).

I used to have a pr-paid cell phone once upon a time with Singular (now AT&T). One tip to look out for when shopping and reading the fine print is to make sure your phone doesn't come with any sort of daily access fee. Which basically means you will be charged a dollar a day whether you use the phone or not.

Anyone know if these pre-paid phones allow international calling? I don't make too many calls, but when I do they are to my family in Europe, so I have a plan with t-mobile that gets me better international rates. If prepaid has exorbitant rates for these calls, it won't be worth it for me.

@Murph1908: I was aiming that comment more toward the prepaid, where almost everything is a-la-carte.

In constrast, my contract bill usually has 3 or 4 text messages on it, while everything else is inside the flat rate.

@Kicken: GoPhone has options for both auto billed and manual refill.

My wife and I had TMobile but we switched to tracfone. We both got phones that had a double minutes for life feature and signed up for the monthly family plan. So for 100 minutes for her phone and 60 minutes for my phone, we pay $16 a month. Not bad considering we never used close to all the minutes before. One text message uses 1/3 of a minute. And we paid $40 for the phones granted, but that still can't be beat. And around here tracfone uses ATT and TMobile towers so we get even better signals than before.

It's a matter of preference and usage. I'm 36 years old, and I live in a big city. I go out a lot and stay busy, but I just refuse to be on the phone all the time. I know people that use it like an umbilical cord, and that's fine. A good land line is still the best thing in my opinion. I snag a pre paid and use it when I need it, a $100 card last me months! If you wanna talk my ear off, meet me for a drink - geez

The only cellphone I've had in the last 7 years is prepaid. I just eventually realized that there's no one I have to talk to so bad that I'd pay 30 or more a month to do it from my car instead of from the phone or computer.

@Kicken: i use virgin mobile and i have the option to automatically renew, which saves me money. BUT i can go online and turn that off at anytime if i just want to cut my phone off or go to prepaid by the minute for a while. if i want to set up the special deal again i have to call and ask for a human but it hasn't been a problem to do that yet.

@Ash78: Well with a prepaid, there is no bill to dispute. If you have service questions with prepaid service from any of the big cell companies, you still have customer service with records of your calls.

My GoPhone tells me "you have $XX remaining" every time I hang up, or use my phone else-wise. Pretty hassle free.

When I initially got it, I believed they were inaccurately debiting my account. I called them up and complained. Thought they couldn't see any problems from their end, they still gave me $5 credit.

The only downside is that most everything "extra" such as txting, checking your voicemail, etc - suddenly costs.

@Ash78: When I looked at Verizon's prepaid a few months ago they had the worst plans then anybody...

I have T-mobile prepaid, and it's a very good deal. It's about $9/mo for me when I work it out. I recharge the phone with $100 every time it's low, since the pre-minute cost is lowest if you spent $100.

I use it for short conversations every few days, grocery lists, that kind of thing.

- Gavin

@CharlesOryx: Mine only charges me the days I use the phone.

My husband and I have had our Virgin Mobile phones for two years now. We love them. He's a texting freak, and I really only carry mine around in case of emergencies or if I want to talk a few minutes. Our plan is 18 cents a minute, 10 cents per text message.

You have to "top-up" your account every 90 days to keep your account active, but that's only $20. And that adds minutes to your phone as well. So I spend $20 every three months. My husband, the text freak, has to spend $20 every two months. You can buy "top-up" cards at many stores or buy minutes online at www.virginmobileusa.com

Right now, I have to "top-up" again in february, but I still have $40 worth of minutes on my phone. That's really the only drawback to this that I can find. I'll have these crazy amounts of minutes on my phone and still have to spend another $20 to keep it active. But it's better than the $90 a month we were spending with AT&T!

I think you can get an equally great deal if you have a family plan and dont need a phone with internet.

My parents have a family plan with my brother. My brother uses the most minutes, so he takes the main line and my parents cellphones are $10 each a month and they get way more than 80 minutes.

Meg, I'm sorry but your YMMV with this one.

My wife and I use Sprint (yes, people still use them) and we pay $65 for 2 lines which both have:

-1,000 anytime minutes
-Long Distance
-Unlimited internet/text messaging/Sprint to sprint

And we're not on SERO. I asked them for their best plan, and told them we've had their service for 10 years (which isn't a complete lie...) and that's what the woman in retentions came back with.

Everyone may not want to haggle their cell phone service like me, but it's worth while. You get a great deal, know what you're going to pay, and you still qualify for great phones with discounts.

There is one trick, though. If you don't use your phone for a period of time (I think 60 days), you lose your number. This happened to an acquaintance - she only used it when she traveled, and she had to scramble to get her phone reactivated.

@Dave J.: My daughter has the same plan, and we are very happy with it. Also, if you let Virgin Mobile automatically take their payments, you only have to pay 15 dollars every 3 months!

Im sure its a reginal company but I got my wife a monthly prepay plan from Ntelos. after taxes its about $50 a month and she gets 300 texts and I think shes on 600 minutes a month and gets free nights and weekends starting at 7:30

We got my father to agree to carry a prepaid cell phone by telling him it made him look like Jason Bourne.

I have had a pre-paid cell phone for several years. It mainly gets used when I am traveling and I need to find people, or tell them my plane is late. I've been quite satisifed with it. One tip: when renewing, pay attention to whether your payment will extend for another X days *in addition to* the number of days you still have left from the last renewal, or if the subscription gets reset to X days from the day you renewed. You may find you'll make your money go farthest if you wait until shortly before the deadline to renew.

@gavni: Same here. I don't bother with the 100-dollar refills because I don't think I will EVER use as many minutes as I have. I work from home. I have a land line (must have, to get my DSL service that is the best and most reliable in the city). So I really only use my cell when I travel. Average use maybe a half hour per month, really truly. And my phone is unlocked so I don;t have to bother with contracts. Allergic to them for cell phones, anyway.

I used a TracFone prepaid for about two years when I didn't make many calls and it was definitely "emergency only." I think I spent about $150-$200 for the phone and service for those two years. (There was a deal.)

I have a regular monthly plan phone because it's the only phone I have. I don't actually use many of the 400 minutes, but I take advantage of the free nights/weekends.

Lol, There is a sucker "Bourne" every minute.

@rainmkr: soon the department of homeland security will be at your house to take you on a field trip to Guantanamo Bay, I hope to see you again online if they decide your not a terrorist in like 50 years of if you escape somehow...

I use my office phone at the office, my land line when I'm home, and my magicJack when I'm abroad and need to call home (it works through the Internet and my company pays for that access in the hotel). I don't use my cell while I'm driving (I really do stop and get off the road first). I don't give out the number to ANYONE without thinking HARD about it (if my job wanted to contact me whenever they want to, they can issue me a cell themselves). I really only use it in the airport, or for directions, or for emergencies, or for quick calls of the "I'm at the store, do you want anything" nature. I think I average a half hour a month or so. T-Mobile, no contract, unlocked Motorola KRZR.

After several years of being without a phone, I decided that having one outweighed not having one and started looking for family plans, my wife had the cheapest Sprint plan plus a work discount. Since going with a Family plan would more than double the monthly costs I decided to get myself a prepaid phone and settled on Tracfone. I have since ported my wife's number to tracfone and have not had any issues nor regrets.

i used to use prepaid AT&T/cingular but when cingular sent me a letter during their merge with AT&T saying my [at the time] current phone was too old for them to service and they were cutting my service off in 30 days [basically a 'sucks to be you' letter] i shopped around.
since i had no credit and a low paying job at the time i needed prepaid. and went with virgin mobile, which has been very satisfactory over the years.
now that i make more money, i still don't use my phone much, mostly for texting actually so i have a nicer phone, but still virgin mobile.
i am not thrilled with the fact that the phone's software is proprietary and i can't unlock [i tried and had to reinitialized their software] but most people won't care.

i have a package that gives me more minutes than i usually use but not enough more for it to be a complete waste, with unlimited text and picture messages plus the ability to use yahoo IM or AIM from my phone. and since i found out i don't HAVE to attach a picture to a picture message i use it for 'text' messages up to 1800 characters. yup, free mobile email. i keep some pictures on my phone anyway just in case i want to send one along to be cute.

My grandparents wanted a phone for emergencies only. They almost never use it.

After extensive research to find the cheapest and simplest option, we settled on Virgin Mobile prepaid which blew away all other options. I'm not sure if the plan is still available to new customers, but under the "Minute2Minute" plan we set up a few years ago, Virgin automatically bills grandma's credit card $15 (currently $16.24 with tax) every 90 days, which is the minimum to keep the account alive. That $15 gets added to their prepaid funds, which doesn't expire as long as they keep the account in good standing. Virgin deducts 25c/min of talk time from the pool, but since they only use a few minutes each month, they currently have a positive balance of $167, or over 600 minutes.

So for just over $5 a month, they have a mobile phone they can use for emergencies, and the credit all effectively rolls over, so if they ever decide they want to use it more regularly, they have a nice bank of talk time built up.

But... Losers can still use them, right? Sigh...

I've looked into this before as I have fairly low usage on my phone. Basically it only really makes sense if you don't use your phone every day in addition to the minutes you use. Even very light daily usage rapidly erodes any savings.

@formergr: there are other ways to go about that - for example, calling cards with a domestic number you call and then enter your international number, so you only pay the domestic rate from your phone and then a much lower international rate from there.

Not quite as easy, and you're right - the international rates on prepaid phones are terrible.

@jurijuri: It depends on the service. With T-Mobile, once you've bought a total of $100 in minutes, you only need to add time once a year to keep your number. And there's no daily deduction either - with the $100 cards, it ends up being a flat $0.10/minute with nothing on top.

I've been using them as my only telephone for quite a while - I add a $100 card every six months, which means I'm paying less than $20/month.

The downside to T-Mobile (which is otherwise a better deal than the other prepaids IMHO) is that the coverage is pretty minimal in rural areas - it doesn't work in most of northern New England, for example.

Got a prepaid phone through TMobile in May last year. I buy 1000 minutes for $100 I average about $15-$20/mo as opposed to my AT&T bill of $50-$60/mo for a land line. I got rid of AT&T when I got the cell phone. I really hate using a phone, anyway, since that's the bulk of my job during the day, so this is perfect for me. And I save $$$ (woohoo)

I've got a T-Mobile, and effectively pay $8.33 a month for the phone. I got tired of paying $40 a month for sometimes as little as 10 minutes a month usage. Yea, I'm anti-social like that.

I have excellent credit, but use a prepaid phone from TracFone. It's got the things I need - a working telephone with text capabilities - without a bunch of extra junk. (I opted for a cheaper model without a camera or Web access.) The price is right, no contracts, and I'm not vain enough to require a RAZR or talkative enough for unlimited talk/text, so I'm fine with it.

@EliasMacropod: Elias, that's the real issue here, if everyone would stop thinking that cell phones were a necessity rather than a luxury then they could make the mental leap to "allow" their selves to use a prepaid or no phone at all. We had the standard family plan that should have cost 80.00 a month but since mommy in law wants to call on a daily basis for inane crap, running the bill up to 100-120 a month, we turned it off. The wife got a prepaid, I don't use a cell. Our bill went to around 10 bucks a month. The phone costs 30 bucks because we don't want (cell phones are usually not a "need") anything fancy. We use Tmobile with zero issues, good coverage, good customer service etc.

Cellphone companies have done a wonderful job of placing their product in a position where people equate them with their cable and water bill, "We just have to have one...." There was a time in this world where we all made it through our daily lives without calling each other every 10 minutes.... Damn...I'm turning into an old grouch.....