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Cell Phone Cheaps Rejoice!

May 6, 2015 by Lazy Man 6 Comments

A few minutes ago, I installed a Cricket Wireless Prepaid GSM SIM Card (Review) in my Nexus 5 phone. The phone service should cost me $35 a month when I sign up for AutoPay. Unfortunately signing up for AutoPay gives me the following message, “The system couldn’t process your request. We apologize for any inconvenience. Please try again later.”

Whenever “later” comes along (hey it just came along… and here it is again), I’ll save about $12 from what I was paying Straight Talk.

It seems like there’s an arm’s race in cheap cell phone service. I pulled the trigger on that, but Google’s Project Fi Mobile Service? is almost as tempting.

But yesterday things got a little more interesting.

Rick Broida of CNET’s Cheapskate blog upped the ante by noting that StackSocial has a $199 deal for a Nexus 5 and a YEAR of service. You’d pay more than that for either the phone or the service almost anywhere else and you get BOTH. The service is through Freedom Pop and it runs on the Sprint network. Those may be deal-breakers for some, but a deal this good has to have a couple of strings attached, right?

The data is limited to 500MB which isn’t a lot. I use around 1GB a month, which adds another $12.50 (2.5 cents per MB). If you use a lot of data, this may not be for you.

Between the data costs and the Sprint network, I don’t think this is a fit for me, but maybe it works for you? Let me know in the comments.

Filed Under: Spending Tagged With: cell phone, Nexus 5

Best Cell Phone/Plan Savings Today

November 21, 2013 by Lazy Man 15 Comments

Since this blog is older than dirt (okay, will you settle for the iPhone?), I’ve covered a lot of ways on how to save money on cell phone and cell phone plans.

When I started the blog, the best deal (assuming you had coverage) was Sprint SERO, where you could get a great plan on a major carrier with top speed unlimited data for $25. I had that plan for years and just shook my head when people paid twice that, because they didn’t shop around. Alas, Sprint got wise to it and if you wanted the latest phone, the Palm Pre, they pushed you to a $69 plan because it used a lot more data. Prices steadily rose to the point where my wife joined Sprint (it was the best coverage where we lived) and paid $120 a month for unlimited voice, data, and texting.

If you wanted a good phone, that was pretty much par for the course. Then Virgin Mobile came out with a low-end Android phone that you could have on a $25. I considered switching then, but the phones offered weren’t good enough to give up my trusty Pre. When HP said it was going to stop making new devices running Palm’s OS it was time to move on. Fortunately Virgin Mobile had a middle of the road Motorola Triumph that fit in its $25 plan. I ran with that for a year before I decided that the combination of Android and a phone without a keyboard wasn’t working for me. I actually paid more money per month, $45 to go to obsolete hardware, the Pre 3, on an obsolete OS because it was much better for me than anything else.

All this is a long-winded way of saying that I’ve looked through a lot of cell phone plans over the years to find a sweet spot between cheap and functional. One universal truth is almost is never about how much you spend on the phone, but how much you spend on the cell phone plan.

When my wife was on the $120/month Sprint plan she paid around $99 for an HTC Evo. That’s nothing compared to the $2880 she was going to spend over the two year contract. That was the driving force to get me to the $25 Virgin Mobile plan (which no longer exists by the way). The cost of $600 over two years is a cool $2280 in my pocket. Who cares if the phone cost me $299 when I’m going to be saving $2000, right?

Alas the Virgin Mobile price has gone up from the $25. We are still grandfathered in, but we can’t get any new phones, which means no 4G data and being stuck with a phone that was mid-level in 2011. I no longer feel it is in the sweet spot because the functionality now in late 2013 is so much better.

So what’s the best cell phone/plan value today? It’s going to be different for different people who use cell phones in different ways, but I believe I found something that gives you almost all the functionality at a fraction of the price.

Since we established the carrier plan is where the bulk of the cost comes in, it makes sense to start there. I’ve looked at a lot of carriers and the major players (Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon) seem to all charge around $80-$100/month for voice/text/data… and that data is typically limited. That’s a huge jump from $25 and personally, I’m not willing to around $1500 over two years for the functionality of the latest phones.

Fortunately, there are some cheap pre-paid carriers (and they represent the best deals). My favorite of them is Straight Talk, which has a partnership with Wal-Mart. For $45 a month you get unlimited voice/text and 2GB of 4G LTE data. That’s LTE on AT&T’s network which is pretty good. If you need more data than that you are probably going to have to look elsewhere, because after that they can throttle your speeds down to 2G networks… yikes! 2GB is a good amount of data as long as you aren’t streaming music and long videos. There are other carriers around the same price as Straight Talk, but I didn’t see them offering 4G LTE on AT&T’s network, or they had some other catch. That said, I’ll be the first to say that Straight Talk’s customer service is terrible. Fortunately, I don’t have to deal with them very often.

The beauty of Straight Talk’s $45 plan is that you can bring your own unlocked phone. The question becomes what’s a good unlocked phone? There are plenty of cheap unlocked phones, but at that point you might as well stick with the Motorola Triumph, right? Plus we’ve established that the cost of the phone is the smaller part of the overall bill, so splurging a little bit doesn’t hurt. Unfortunately it seems like all the best unlocked phones cost about $650 and more. In fact, an unlocked 32GB iPhone 5S will set you back $750. However, you can get a stylish case and some screen protectors for under $20.)

Finally, you can save a little more on Straight Talk’s plan by buying a full year at once, bringing your cost to around $41 per month. So if you were to pair this with the top line 32GB Nexus 5, you’d get a phone with top of the line screen resolution, processing processor, and storage for $1,383 over two years. That’s less than half what my wife was paying for her Evo a few years ago. Half-price, better network, and a quantum leap in phone technology? Not only that, but you aren’t locked into a contract and can sell your phone on Ebay and use that money towards an upgrade whenever you feel like it. What’s not to like, right?

Honorable Mention: If that price is a little steep and you can deal with a locked phone, Republic Wireless has an interesting deal. A Motorola X phone (in my opinion a shade worse than the Nexus 5, but still a very good phone according to reviews) for $299 paired with either a $25 plan (3G) or a $40 plan (4G). If 3G is good for you, $15/mo is nothing to sneeze at. I feel like if you are going to get 4G, you are better off with Straight Talk for about the same price, because you can move your unlocked phone to another network at a later date, have a wider audience to resell it to, and AT&T’s 4G coverage seems better than Sprint’s.

Filed Under: Save Money On..., Smart Purchases, Spending Tagged With: cell phones, Nexus 5, Straight Talk

I’m Sick Over My Most Recent $399 Purchase

October 31, 2013 by Lazy Man 6 Comments

About an hour ago I bought a Google Nexus 5, the 32GB one in black. It was $399… for a phone. I’ve showered and I still dirty and sick about it… but I am pretty sure I’d do it again.

I’ve been rocking a HP Pre 3 running webOS for about 18 months now. It’s the perfect device for me. From the wireless charging, to the Synergy of combining all my email accounts, to the multitasking, notifications, gestures and the slide-out physical keyboard for one-handed use while walking the dog, it’s perfect.

… except for the 2011 technology makes it slow, and the bug that makes it reload every 20 seconds (making you wait another minute for your next 20 second reading window), and the 12 apps that are still supported on the platform, and the way it reboots at random times, and the lack of turn-by-turn navigation software for it, and a camera so bad that I ask other people to take pictures and send them to me.

In short, it was time for a new phone. Most of the world would go to AT&T or Verizon and get an iPhone or a Galaxy for a subsidized price of $199. That’s the kind of money you don’t have to shower yourself over. However, it comes with a catch… signing a contract for two years that can run $80-$100 a month. Over that time, the total cost of the phone comes to around $2200. Alternatively, my StraightTalk plan runs me about $42 a month putting me at a two year price of around $1400.

I’m trying to talk myself into believing it is an $800 savings, but it isn’t working. Why? Because I was already saving that money with my previous phone. I’m trying to talk myself into the fact that I’ll be more productive, but somewhere I get the feeling that it will translate to reading more articles about the Patriots (and for the first time in a dozen years, most of those articles aren’t rosy).

I am able to convince myself that I’ll take more pictures of my son, the one now and the one coming. I’m able to convince myself that I’ll get software set up so that if my websites get taken down, I have a reasonable shot at getting them up without my laptop. I’m able to convince myself that the longer battery use (17 hours of talk time sounds unbelievable) will be a godsend when I travel (which is rare).

I’m able to convince myself that I’ll probably be able to sell my old Pre 3 on Ebay for around $100. Plus when it’s time to upgrade my Nexus 5 in a few years, I’ll probably still get $150 or so for it.

Finally, I’m able to convince myself that while it does seem crazy to spend $400 for a phone, making myself feel sick over it doesn’t make sense… especially with how important technology is to me and my business.

Filed Under: Spending Tagged With: Nexus 5

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