Dana’s divorce left her with crappy credit and now AT&T wants a $750 deposit! She’s wondering if anyone has any advice for avoiding such a large deposit…

Hi there! It’s kinda embarrassing for me to write this, because I obviously have crappy credit that I managed to incur through a divorce. But I’m hoping that you have some insight.

I have been planning to buy an iPhone 3G since the second they were announced. Yesterday, just because I wanted to know how much I would be forking out for a deposit, I visited an AT&T store and asked them to run my credit to find out how much I would need. They hemmed and hawed about running it at first, but they finally did. The price they quoted was $750 for the deposit. Not WITH the phone, but just the deposit.

I’ve been a Verizon customer since last fall. When I bought my Chocolate (ugh) I paid a $150 deposit on it. And I never, EVER was disconnected for non-payment. I thought that was fair. But why $750 for a phone (an admittedly nice phone, but still.) Is this part of their effort to keep people from hacking? I asked them if they were going to offer a GoPhone for credit-challenged folks, and they said no (and I’d heard that elsewhere anyway.)

Does anyone have any idea on how I could get the iPhone without tripling the price. Thanks!

Dana

Don’t be embarrassed Dana, divorce can be rough on your finances and, let’s face it, it’s not like AT&T itself has good credit or anything. We’ve heard rumors that one can get the current model iPhone and use it as a GoPhone, (by the way, plenty of people with excellent credit use prepaid phones in order to avoid abusive cellphone contracts as a matter of personal preference) but since the new model is going to be subsidized, we’re guessing it might be more difficult to reach GoPhone utopia.

Commenters? Can you help Dana out? Or is she stuck with this crappy deposit?

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