This tip comes from my reader Buffy…
My son found himself stuck in the Atlanta airport during the ice storm that hit the south in early January. We were approaching our monthly minute limit and I was worried we would go over. I called the cellphone company and explained the situation. They gave us 300 free minutes to use over the next 90 days! We were able to stay in contact until he got home safely. It never hurts to ask!
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(Thanks My Check Bounced!)
Great tip!
To save on cell phone costs, we decided to try using T-Mobile pre-paid cards this year. The downside is that we don’t get any free/discounted phones, since we have no contract. (Fortunately, we had been with AT&T so long that we had no trouble getting them to unlock our phones for an international trip we took last summer. After the trip, we switched to T-Mobile pre-paid using the same phones. We dind’t feel guilty about doing it that way, because we’d been with them so long and had those phones so long that we felt we had every right to keep using those phones!)
Anyway, we’ve been on the pre-paid card system for about 2/3 of a year now, and if things keep up at this rate, we will have spent less than half of what we spent on our cell phone bill on the contract system! We try to stretch our minutes as long as possible by using landlines as much as possible. When I am visiting my parents and need to make a call, I don’t whip out my cell phone … I use my parents’ landline phone. At work, I always use my work phone, unless it’s long distance or a private conversation I need to go outside for.
Also, with pre-paid cards, you can take advantage of store deals. For example, once, our local grocery store had the following deal: Buy a $50 pre-paid phone card, get a $10 restaurant gift card for free!
This won’t make sense for everyone. If you don’t have a landline, or if you do a lot of talking/texting, it may not make sense for you. But it’s worth looking into.
I’ve done the same thing, but it was after I got our bill. It was last August when a hurricane was predicted to hit E. NC with a lot of rain and possible flooding (we only got wind). I spent about an hour on the phone with just our insurance company getting renters insurance, because it was so detailed and covers everything. Plus on and off the phone with my worried mother in Alabama. Dh was in Cali on a training op, so it was just me and Ds.
I got our bill and called the company, explained what was happened and the representative was nice enough to add extra minutes to bring our bill down. Speaking of cell phone bill, I need to check this months.