There are several Tricks to saving money on your Prepaid Cell Phone bills.

Don’t sign that long term contract. That long term cell phone contract makes you pay for service no matter how much you use it. Almost all the prepaid cell phone plans allow you to roll over your minutes, you will still have to pay a yearly or semimonthly payment to keep your phone active but if you move or decide you don’t need a phone you can quit the service any time you want.

Don’t answer your phone. Often if I am near a land line I will not answer my cell phone and I will call whoever called me right back from a land line. I call this using your cell phone like a pager but it works fine for me. I use my prepaid phone to deliver messages not to talk for long periods.

Text Message instead of calling. Often it will cost you one half a minute or one third of a minute to text a message. If you use texting to communicate and not for recreation it can be an easy inexpensive way to get a message to someone. With Tracfone the cost to text is different on different phones, some it costs .5 units in and .5 units out, some it is free to receive and .5 units out and some it is .3 units in and .3 units out.

Don’t sign up for voice mail on your phone. Voice mail is a great airtime waster. The time you spend accessing your voice mail will burn lots of prepaid minutes. Just use the phone number in caller ID and call them back. Some people will leave long winded voice messages and not really say anything. If you are good about calling people back it is not that inconvenient for people if they cannot leave a message.

Put all the people you know into your contact file. This makes it really easy to know who is calling and whether or not to call them back.

Don’t put a large number of prepaid minutes on your phone. I find when I have a lot of minutes to use I use a lot more minutes. If I don’t have much time left I will stretch it farther. Instead of burning money on cell phone minutes I would rather buy another six pack—Coca Cola of course.

Buy minutes in larger quantities. This is the exact opposite of my last suggestion, with some Prepaid vendors you get a much better price per minute if you buy a large denomination. T-Mobile gives you a better deal if you spend $100 at one time. Tracfone also charges less for minutes if you buy in larger denominations.

Use Tracfone Bonus Codes.

Check out your new Prepaid Phone. Before installing a large number of minutes on your new phone use the phone a little. If you put a large number of minutes on your new phone and then discover that it does not get good coverage where you want to use it you will not be able to get a refund on the minutes. Most of the prepaid companies will only refund your hardware purchase price not the phone services price.

Get Voip phone services for your land line so all your long distance and local calls will be one price. Many people use their cell phone to make all their long distance phone calls and use up their minutes that way. If you use a prepaid cell phone your minutes will roll over so you don’t need to use them up. A Voip land line can cost you less than $100 per year with a ton of free additional services included. Voip landlines are one of the best deals going in phone services. Often the land line Voip call is much easier to hear than with a cell phone.

Rick C. Kern
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