I am a total planner. I like to know where I’m going and have a buffer to make sure there is enough time, money, or leeway to do in whatever I plan to accomplish. An example might be mapping out a driving route and giving myself an extra 15 – 30 minutes for potty breaks (yes, I have a young child and use the word potty) or a little extra money in some of the budget categories for things like flocculating gasoline prices. But one thing I haven’t budgeted for is phone usage.
My wife and I share a phone plan with minutes, text and data usage. We don’t use them enough to need an unlimited plan, so we have limited minutes, data, and text. There have been times when I have caused us to go over those minutes and recently I have caused us to go over our data usage plan.
It was easy to go over, to blow the minute usage “budget”. Each time I went over it was because I wasn’t paying attention, I wasn’t tracking my minutes or forecasting future usage. There was no plan for it, no limit, and there was no ceiling on how much my cell phone provider would over-charge me for every minute of call time I exceeded over our monthly contracted amount. It was frustrating and ALL MY FAULT.
Do you have suggestions on how I can do better with my cell phone plan? What does your family do to make sure you don’t go over? I would love to hear your ideas or suggestions.
Please leave a comment and share your wisdom, I would love the help.
Depending on which carrier you have, there are different options. My wife and I both carry Blackberry phones and have unlimited text and data. Before we migrated to the Blackberry we decided to go with a generous text plan so that we wouldn’t go over. I read an article last week that texting services have the highest profit margin (around 400%) of all available consumer services. It’s no fun to get charged 25 cents per extra text. Another bad habit that we had to get away from was the 411 service. At one time Sprint charge $2.50 per 411 call.
@joel i second the getting rid of 411 thing … i use bing-411 all the time (1-800-246-4411).
@steve, one thing that sounds common sense but I find most people never think to do – treat your phone company as a service agent and partner; don’t assume that they will always try to hose you out of as much money as possible, but instead give a call to their billing or service dept. and see if they can make any suggestions for you.
I had a great experience with my phone company recently where I basically just called their service department (add/drop services), explained that I thought our bill was way too high for what we were using, and what could we do?
She walked me through their options, offered suggestions on different plans, helped figure out whether we needed them or not, recommended some other cost-saving measures. Additionally, i was offered some short-term rate discounts to make up for being on hold and so on. Overall a great process that is saving me some $350 a year now!
Only downside was the 20m hold time, then of course 15m on the phone working it all out. Well worth it for the savings though!