How much do your phone plans actually cost?

SuZir

Well-Known Member
For a long time I just wondered what to me seemed like odd obsession to who pays kid's/young adult's phone bill. It something I have never been heard mentioned in my country. I mean few years back kids had max in their accounts and even lately I have heard of situations where younger child has bought lots of soda etc. from vending machines and caused quite a bill, but I have never heard anyone talking about if they should pay their young adult kid's phone bill or not. Much less seen mobile costs being mentioned with some major costs like car insurances etc.

Our own difficult child is currently officially living home (not in reality but it makes sdome things easier) and we get his more official mail including his phone bills. If he is coming to visit soon we may give them to him if not we tend to be too lazy to post them so we pay them instead and just tell him it has been taken care of. His and Joy's bills for unlimited 4G data and unlimited calls and texts inside the country are about 30 dollars each. There may be some extra if he has paid a parking or some public transport ticket with the phone. I have smaller packet: unlimited 3G with 21 mega max speed and 300 hundred minutes and 300 texts, it is around twenty dollars a month.

I have hears the one thing that is cheap in my country are mobile phone charges but I just heard someone saying that this type of services would cost a really a lot more in US or UK. And I don't mean 10 or 20 % more but really a big difference. Now I'm curious how much using modern smart phone actually cost in your neck of woods.
 

Californiablonde

Well-Known Member
Unfortunately my cell bill for myself and both my kids is $293 a month. easy child is to blame for most of it. He downloads games and music that use up a TON of data, and with our phone company they don't offer unlimited data plans. It's by far my most expensive monthly bill.
 

SuZir

Well-Known Member
Unfortunately my cell bill for myself and both my kids is $293 a month. easy child is to blame for most of it. He downloads games and music that use up a TON of data, and with our phone company they don't offer unlimited data plans. It's by far my most expensive monthly bill.
Wow, that is a lot! And no unlimited data? I'm not sure if our phone companies even offer anything else in packets. They limit the speed (cheapest are 512 k and around five bucks a month) or you pay only for days you have used it (I think that is about two dollars a day for 4G or top speed 3G.)
 

InsaneCdn

Well-Known Member
All I can do is dream of costs that low...

Over $180/month for 3 of us, with limited data/internet, unlimited calls and texts. It's a reasonably generous plan but... there really isn't a cheaper plan that still gives what I need for work...

This is NOT the USA ;)
 

BusynMember

Well-Known Member
For us, we have four phones and our two youngest kids, Jumper and Sonic are on our plan, and so far we have not made them pay or get their own phone plans because it would be so expensive. We really have a good deal. Unlimited texting and calling to the U.S. anywhere is $180 a month.

That's bargain basement.

It used to be over $200 mo., but Tom talked to the guy in charge and got it down a bit as a concession for us signing up for another year.

If it was just Tom and I, we'd probably just get cheap cells with no internet, if we could find any, but I hear they aren't going to make them anymore. If so, that alone will up the cost.
 

Lil

Well-Known Member
USA here too and we have unlimited text, talk, data, long distance, etc...about $235 per month for the three of us. Will be less come June when we finally drop the boy off. Kind of crazy when you figure you can buy a phone at Walmart then get a unlimited card for about $50 per month.

I'm going to have to think about that when we drop the kid off.
 

GoingNorth

Crazy Cat Lady
Just me. My cellphone is my only phone. Text and phone only. No data service. 900 free minutes a month. Friends and family calling (free calls to a limited list of other Verizon customers)

Between 73 and 82 dollars a month depending on prime time usage. I don't use anywhere near 900 minutes a month, but had to get that package in order to get friends and family which saves me money over the 400 minutes a month plan which, on the surface, appears to be cheaper.
 

muttmeister

Well-Known Member
I have a family plan with Verizon; it is for 3 phones for me, my son, and my daughter in law. If nobody does anything crazy it is around $275 but son uses a lot of data. This month it's only $340 but last month it was $420.
 

Jabberwockey

Well-Known Member
One thing you have to really watch in the U.S. is the data charges. If you don't have unlimited data and have less than responsible children (yeah, none of us here have THAT problem! LOL!) then data overages can be KILLER! We did briefly look into a plan when we drop our son off that would drop the total to around $100 for unlimited talk, text, and data. And don't let the kids use the WiFi hotspot! We found out the hard way there is limited data with that.
 

SuZir

Well-Known Member
To be honest, even if you are responsible, many ways to use smart phones and tablets tend to require quite a lot of data. And if you do not use the 'smart' features of your smart features of your smart phone, you could as well have Nokia 3310. I mean, that thing needed to be charged once a week, you could not break it (or at least it was exceedingly hard) and it had much better reception than any of my smart phones have had :D (Yeah, kind of miss the old bugger every now and then...)

My own data usages isn't that big normally, just few gigas a month, if I do not travel, but both of my boys use really a lot, and also hotspot a lot to their tablets. All those hours in buses and Netflix, YouTube and Spotify do that. Streaming really uses data a lot. But then again, streaming music or video kind of is one of the best parts in smart phones. If you want news, you can listen radio, if you want to know the weather, you can go outside and look (some reason all my smart phones have always thought I would be extremely interested looking from the phone which kind of weather it is outside in the place I currently am) and so on. Streaming something to watch while on the move is one of the real new features in smart phones compared to old mobile phones.
 

Jabberwockey

Well-Known Member
To be honest, even if you are responsible, many ways to use smart phones and tablets tend to require quite a lot of data.

Cant argue that! Although my wife and I use less than 2 gigs of data per month I can guarantee it was more before I went back inside an institution. I streamed music at work before but that's part of the reason we have unlimited data!

On a related note: Watch out for the data on your internet at home as well. My wife and I never realized that our cable company had put a data cap on our home internet until our son came home. No exaggeration, he increased our internet usage hugely! We had a cap of 250 gig and before he came home we were using around 30 or 40 gig a month, even with me online gaming. After he came home, we were almost capped on our data two weeks into the billing cycle. Youtube, Netflix, downloading music, all that streaming plays hell with data usage!
 

Marcie Mac

Just Plain Ole Tired
Mine is 227 a month for myself, SO and Danny thru Verizon - Jamie has ATT and his work pays for it. Dans cost is about 45.00 of that a month as he gets a discount from work thru I "think" their payroll services but he pays his share every month. Both mine and Danny's are out of contract, and am constantly getting mail from Verizon seeing if we want a better deal on their services :) He and I have not upgraded our phones so we both could keep unlimited data ,but SO does not. Our minutes are 1400 a month but am going to reduce that to 700 since all three phones have unlimited text and no one actually "talks" on the phone anymore. Also going is the insurance on each phone - I bought SO his phone thru Amazon and got a really good price - better than what Verizon was charging.


Marcie
 

susiestar

Roll With It
We are strictly pay as you go with Net10. I pay $25 a month for 1250 min to use for talk text and data. I use maybe 30 min a month because I hate talking on the phone. husband & J have 'smart' phones and get unlimited everything for $40 a month each. thank you lost his phone and rarely used it so he hasn't taken advantage of my offer to set him up on a smart phone like husband's and J's. we have a 3rd one because husband lost his and they had them on sale for $10 so I got him a new one like the old one. Then a week later he found the old one. But thank you isn't interested.

So we pay about $105 a mo for phones, plus the home phone. OUr internet and tv are cheaper if we have the phone than if we cancel it, so we have it but rarely use it.
 

Californiablonde

Well-Known Member
I really need to quit AT&T and sign up with somebody else who offers unlimited data. It looks like I'm paying WAY too much for our phones. Too bad we still have another year contract with our current carrier.
 
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