by Sandy Fitzgerald

Created on: September 17, 2008

Once upon a time, my teenaged son and I used pay-as-you-go telephones.
I thought it was a good idea at the time. After all, I really believed it was a way to keep our telephone spending under control and to teach him how to budget his time better.
Boy, was I a fool!
We were using AT&T/Cingular's Go Phone plan. Under that program, there are two ways you can go. You can purchase phone time and use your phone at 10 cents a minute, or you can buy prepriced plan packages.

Because I was under the delusion that I didn't use my phone very much, I went with the 10 cents a minute plan. With my son, I purchased a plan for about $50 a month that gave him about 400 minutes a month to use.
If we did text messaging, it was 15 cents a message.
Again, boy, was I a fool.
I would buy myself about $25 worth of time, and then pay his $50 a month bill. That totalled $75 a month.
If it only stayed that simple.
I am a newspaper editor. As such, even when I'm away from my office, I'm never really away. There are times people need to get hold of me, and when they do, they call my cell phone.
Ca-ching! There go the prepaid minutes.
So the $25 a month sometimes stretched into $35 or even $50 a month, just for my phone.
Then comes the son.
Things weren't bad when he was just using his phone for conversations. After all, the $50 a month included free nights and weekends, and he did talk a lot at night.
But people also called him at other times...and sometimes he would have a girlfriend who just LOVED to text.
At 15 cents a pop, it doesn't take too many "what are you doing" messages to ring up a bigger bill.
So the $50 would dwindle away, and I'd end up adding another $25 or so a month to his phone as well.
Our $75 bill would month-by-month reach about $50 on my end, and another $75 or more on his, for a total of at least $125 just for cell phones.
Then I signed onto a contract with Alltel. I did it to save money and also to receive better phone signals, since I work out in the country and Alltel works better there.
I now pay only $98 a month, including taxes, for both our phones. That includes 1,000 minutes for us to share, free nights and weekends, 1,000 text messages each, a "MyCircle" plan that lets us call 10 people on our list free, day or night, and a roadside assistance plan that replaced my expensive AAA plan.
We never, ever run out of minutes, because most of his friends and mine use Alltel, so those calls are free. We save even more minutes by having our main calls on the MyCircle plan.
Generally, we have about 200 minutes or more left at the end of the month.
For some people, who don't use their phones very often, pay-as-you go makes sense.
But if you have a teenager on one of those phones, you're going to pay a lot more money using a pay-as-you go system. Trust me.
You can lecture, cajole and threaten, and they will run out of minutes. Guaranteed.
So for us and for anyone who uses their cell phones for more than a couple of times a month - or for anyone with teenagers, the contract will work out a lot better.
Just make sure you get a contract that has enough minutes for everyone to use, that has plenty of extra perks and you will find that you will spend a lot less money - and get a lot more benefit - from a contract plan.

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