Sat down and calculated what my current phone rate is and what It has been up 'til now.
From 2008 to 2016 I paid slightly less than $40 per month for cell service. I started with a $15 flip phone plus the "Double Minutes" add-on for another $15. I averaged about 400 minutes per month usage. Always Pay-As-You-Go, so sometimes more, frequently less. Because I generally bought the 90 day airtime card, the service days have added up quite a bit. About 3 years ago, I finally got a smartphone. It was $20, but with their smartphones you get triple minutes, and you can make calls over WiFi. So I had to buy airtime cards less frequently. All told, in the last ten years, I bought about 105 airtime cards averaging $40 each. I am not in a hurry to buy any now because, thanks to Google voice (Do NOT use Tracfone's WiFi calling option, they will charge you minutes, get a Google phone #), I hardly every use the Tracfone minutes, and my service end date is in 2036. It's been more than 6 months since I bought minutes or data.
Currently I am buying minutes about once a year. $100 gets me 1500 minutes talk time, 3000 text mesasges, and 3 Gb of data. In a year I never use more than that because 90% of my talk, data, and texting is through Google Voice using WiFi, because most of my day is spent either at work, home, or school, all places with WiFi. In addition, because my internet provider is Xfinity I have tons of hot spots I can use when I'm out and about.
[* The catch is that you need WiFi. Work and school are free, but for home I am currently paying just under $40 a month for high speed internet (I own my own modem/router, which has saved me $10/month over the past 3 years). I am now trying to figure out a way to reduce my internet costs at home. ]
September 14, 2018 at 02:45PM
