Our two year Verizon cell phone contract finally ran out on the 25th of March! It feels great to break free from the chains of a long contract. I haven’t yet canceled the phone, but I did order and activate a new Virgin Mobile prepaid phone for the Rockette. She is s a low minute user like me.
Previously I had talked about how much I would save with Virgin Mobile and how to set up a Virgin Mobile account, so I thought it would be helpful to revisit my decision. It has been about 6 months, and I have been nothing but pleased with the service and the savings. The free phone is fine, so is the call quality, and the billing. I haven’t been using all of the $20 top up every 90 days, so money does roll over each top up period. Either way I won’t be paying more than $80 for the whole year.
We opted for a semi-updated LG Flare for $30 as the Rockette’s new Virgin Mobile phone, although there are currently three phones that are free. The phone was at our door in about two days, and we received a nice little surprise limited time offer when we signed up. Virgin is offering service for a whole year if you top-up $60 in three days. Since you agree to buy $80 for the whole year, I was sold. I bought the $60 worth of minutes, and won’t have to top up for a whole year. We actually have $67.50 in the account, because we got a free $5 for singing up for automatic top up, and $2.50 for being referred. Considering that the referrer was me on our other account, and I got $10 for it, we really got about a 30% bonus after everything is said and done.
6 months ago we were paying about $400 for one cell phone through Verizon, now we have two cell phones for $140 per year. A solid $260 yearly savings all possible because of our low usage. If you use around 150 or less minutes a month, Virgin Mobile will probably save you money. Let me know if you are interested, and we both can get a free $2.50 if I refer you.
Note : The Virgin Mobile straight minute plan is now $0.20 a minute rather then the $0.18 that I got 6 months ago.
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Nice job finding such a low $$ phone. Unfortunately I don’t have low usage, I don’t have a house phone any more and use my cell for everything. I don’t have the largest plan, but I definately use over 150 minutes a month.
@spilling – Well, at least you cut down from two phone bills to one, that is a nice savings!
That’s very reasonable price for two phones. I’m paying only $20/month but that’s because I’m still on a plan with my family so I end up saving quite a bit. Not looking forward to the day I have my own bills but it will be coming soon as I’m now 18.
You have a very nice blog here. I will definitely need to read around a bit more.
-Scott
Wow, I know I am WAY overpaying for my cell phone service, and my contract with Verizon ran out several months ago. I’ve just been trying to decide where and when to take the leap — this seems like a great deal! The trouble is, my husband uses his cell phone tremendously for his business and we’d need something that had more minutes. Any advice?
@Leslie – You would really need to look at the usage on the phones that you currently have to figure out what plans make sense, then check around for the right company/plan. I have have only looked into what makes sense for us. This little plan finder might help you get started though : cell phone plan finder
Hope it helps
Yeh if we talking about two phones then there is a reasable thing to do, good choice, nothing to say.
Great post – i made the switch to Virgin Mobile a couple of years ago, and I’ve loved it ever since. We went from paying about $40 a month for one cell phone to paying about $40 every 3 months for two phones. We’re sold on Virgin.
I have not used virgin so far, as network reliability is a big issue here in the UK, some of the latest offers from virgin do look like a good bargain
Do you know if you can transfer your number? I’d love to do this but would hate to lose my number.
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