Best Inexpensive Cellphone Plans

[calmloki]

We had 3 phones - 2 stupid Nokia candybars and an Iphone. AT&T was hitting us about $160+/month. AT&T must be feeling the low cost providers, because they now are offering shared voice/data/text for much cheaper: We now have 3 smartish phones with 1GB of shared data, adequate shared voice and texts for $105.64/month, including all fees and taxes.

I picked up this sub $50 smart phone replacement for my ooollld Nokia.

http://www.amazon.com/Nokia-Lumia-52...s=nokia+go+520

Windows operating system on it has some odd quirks and doesn't have as many apps as Iphone or android, but it pretty much blows me away for $50!!! Camera is pretty darn good

[travelover]

PagePlus, $2.50 a month plan. As a light user, I'm totally happy and I can use a smartphone with it.

[mpeirce]

While the following doesn't save us any money, it saves my DM some money.

DW, DS, and I have iPhones on an ATT family plan (no great saving there, but we like having them). We get the minimum number of minutes offered since none of us use the phone for actually talking to anyone. The ATT plan rolls over unused minutes each month and we had accumulated a lot of minutes!

My DM actually uses her phone to talk a lot. So we added her to our family plan for a delta of $35 (including data). She gets to soak up all those otherwise unused minutes and she saved a bunch over having a single user ATT plan for her iPhone.

[walkinwood]

Check out republic wireless if you already have a wi-fi connection at home. A friend of ours is quite happy with it.

[Senator]

I use Walmart Family Mobile. $84 for two phones, all you can eat (TTV). I can even use the phone for a hot spot if I am traveling.

T-Mobile sort of sucks in Marco Island, FL though...

[retirementguy1]

I have had republic wireless for a month now. I am a young user that has wifi at home and at work. I make most of my calls over the home wifi network. I pay $11 per month after taxes for unlimited calls and texts.

[sengsational]

DW has republic wireless, and has had it for over a year. Likes it. DD just got republic (and both DW and DD got $20 credit). There are real people that speak English on customer service!

I have FreedomPop (200 min talk, 500 text, 500MB data for $3.49/mo). Technically it's "free", but to get voice messaging, it's $3.49/mo. Had to buy the (older reconditioned Android) phone outright for like $150. Zero customer service and fairly crappy voice quality (Sprint reseller). But I use the phone on wifi 90% of the time. When using a cell signal, Google navigation works great, and texting works great.

Clark Howard mentioned something called "scratch wireless", but I haven't checked into that.

[ERD50]

Along these lines, a few years ago I was mentioning a well reviewed low-end smart phone, the Samsung Exhibit II (T679), ~ $200 at Walmart. Bought one for DD (she needed a smart phone for some nursing apps for school), and one for DW (she wanted to text more and that's hard w/o a full keyboard, virtual or physical).

These have been OK, but DD is a bigger user and she wanted something better after getting by with this for two years. Of course, she wanted an iPhone like her friends, but those are big $$$ w/o a contract (and I don't like contracts, you'll end up paying more for the phone with more restrictions).

Anyhow, I was following the reports on the Moto G, and they just came out with the newer version with LTE and an sdcard slot. Very good reviews, and ~ $220 at amazon, unlocked. Had to go to t-mobile to have her sim card transferred to a newer micro-sim size (was only $10, decided not to risk cutting it down for that price). She is very happy with it, so I thought I'd pass that along.

Just $199 now!

http://smile.amazon.com/Motorola-Mot...=1&*entries*=0



I'll also mention again, the t-mobile pre-pay 'Gold Status' plan - for low minute users, or occasional high minute/data users - $100 the first year (~ 1000 minutes for the year), and just $10 for following years, and the minutes roll over. Since I literally use ~ 5 minutes a month most months, I get by with the $10/year updates, so just 83 cents per month. Can you beat that?

DW texts enough now, I had to do a $100 refill. But I'll count my blessing at only ~ $9/month.

And here's a great option - if you know you will need high minutes/texts/data for a day or a few days, you can switch to/from an unlimited $3/day plan from your phone. Unlimited talk/text/data. Or $2/day w/o data. That's a bargain if your high usage is an occasional, somewhat predictable thing.

-ERD50

[ChrisTexas]

We love page plus and in a few months they are adding 4G at no extra cost. As everyone jumps on the Iphone 6 bandwagon, if you need a smart phone pick up a used Iphone 5 on craigslist for $200 or less later this year. These phones last forever and can be repaired at low cost. You can buy the page plus plans on other sites for even less than the page plus website. Two iPhones cost a total of $54 a month with plenty of minutes, text and data. We are saving about $800 a year, all towards early retirement.


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