How We Are Saving $2500 (Part 3)

Since I wrote this, I’ve updated our phone service again.  Read about it here.

Week 3 in this Monday Money series has to do with saving $912 per year on our cellphone bill.

A dozen years ago we became a cellphone family.  I inherited my mom’s Tracphone when she passed away in 2001. It was an expensive prepay phone and it still had some minutes on it.

Eventually, I signed us up for a regular plan with one phone and a few months later added a second phone for an extra $10 a month.

We added a 3rd phone for my step-daughter and switched to Verizon when she went off to college.

She’s now married and off our plan and yet somehow our monthly cellphone bill had grown.

$167 for my wife’s old dumbphone and my new Samsung Galaxy S3 was the deal.

Actually that was what it cost for a few months before I upgraded from my Droid to the Galaxy, too.

I really, really enjoyed the Galaxy with it’s 4G speeds and all the features.  It took me at least 10 days to decide to give it up.

Here’s the deal:

PagePlus is a prepay wireless service that offers significant savings over Verizon, but they use the Verizon network.  Switching to PagePlus would mean I still get the same phone network that I’ve been using the past 5 years, but at a lower price.

Here are the details on $$:

My wife’s phone was $30 plus various fees with Verizon.

Her phone with PagePlus is still $30, but the only add-on is sales tax.  She gets 1,200 Voice Minutes + 3,000 Text/MMS Messages + 250 MB Data for $29.95.  She doesn’t use data but this is the best plan for her at the moment.

The remainder of our Verizon $167 month bill, say $130, is my phone.

By switching to PagePlus, I am paying $55. I get Unlimited Talk, Unlimited Text/Picture Messages, 2 GB of Data.

$55 for me, $30 for her plus tax is $91 a month.  Doing the math, that’s a $76 monthly savings which comes out to $912 savings per year.

Thanks again to Dennis at Apex Wireless for setting this up. (260) 471-9100 is their number.

The last two Monday Money articles I showed you how we came up with $2122 in annual savings and now we are at $3034 annual savings each year.

There are a couple of footnotes to share with you.

1. When I bought my Samsung Galaxy 3S and signed a new 2 year agreement with Verizon, they were not going to let me out of that contract without a penalty.  They wanted $350.  So I needed to sell my phone and net at least $350.  Considering the phone was selling for over $400 on ebay, this was easy. List price is $600.

But I really, really liked my Samsung Galaxy 3S with 4G speed. Yet PagePlus does not offer 4G, only 3G.  Since I had my Droid with 3G, I decided to step back and pocket the savings.

2. There were setup fees of $35 for each phone when we made the switch to PagePlus.

3. My cellphone bill could go even lower.  I will be monitoring how much data I really use each month.  If I use less than 250mb each month, I could drop down to the $30 a month plan like my wife has. If you use wi-fi instead of the data from your phone company, it doesn’t count against your data allotment.

4. Final footnote. I modified the way my Droid works without “rooting”it. I use it primarily for phone calls, a camera, a few texts, and checking news, weather, gmail and twitter.  I said “check”, because I usually don’t write emails on my Droid, I will use my laptop with the full size keyboard. Same thing with Twitter, Facebook, and a few other social media platforms. I shared some of those details here.