How to Get an T-Mobile Sidekick, Even With Bad Credit

No matter where you look these days, it seems like everybody has a Sidekick, the fancy, Blackberry-like "smart phone" offered by T-Mobile. You can get a Sidekick for less than $100 if you sign up for a traditional service plan, however if you want a Sidekick without signing up for a plan, it could cost you up to $349. Until recently, people with bad credit were ineligible to sign up for a traditional service plan and had to pay full retail price for their Sidekick and then use it with expensive prepaid service. However, T-Mobile has recently unveiled a new "FlexPay" service option which will allow even people with less-than-perfect credit to get a brand new Sidekick at an affordable price.

T-Mobile FlexPay works a lot like the GoPhone service from AT&T. For those readers who aren't familiar, the concept is actually quite simple. Under a normal cell phone contract, your service starts immediately, and generally you receive a bill at the end of the service period. Basically, you are paying for your cell phone service after it has been provided. With FlexPay from T-Mobile, you are billed at the beginning of each service period, so that you are paying for each month of service in advance. This protects T-Mobile from people with bad credit because if you don't pay your bill, they can cut your phone off and they haven't actually lost any money. With a post-paid plan, if you don't pay your bill, the company is out the money for the services they provided you before they cut your phone off. The concept is so simple that I wonder why it took cell phone companies so long to do this.

So, let's say you see that T-Mobile is offering a brand-new Sidekick Slide for $99.99 when you sign a two-year contract, but you know you have horrible credit and probably won't qualify for a traditional plan. Just head to your local T-Mobile retail store and explain that you would like to get a new Sidekick and sign up for service using FlexPay (the employee will know exactly what you are talking about). They will take down your information, including your driver's license/ID number and your social security number. Don't worry...this is just to verify your identity and your credit won't affect your ability to sign up for service.

Once they get all of your information and you are approved for service, they will ask you if you want to pay full price for the phone or sign a contract to get a discount. This is a personal decision that will depend on how you plan to use the phone. If you plan to keep the phone for less than a year, you won't want to sign a contract, because the cancellation fee will be very high. However, full retail price is often double or triple the contract price, so if you know you want to have a Sidekick for a while, you may very well want to sign a 1- or 2-year contract (they tend to offer bigger discounts when you sign a longer contract). Just remember that this is a real contract...even though you will be paying for your service in advance, if you break your contract, they will send your account to a collection agency to collect the $100-$250 cancellation fee.

Once you select your phone and service plan, you'll need to pay for everything. Because you are a FlexPay customer, you will need enough money to cover the price of the phone, as well as the first month of service, which for a Sidekick will be anywhere from $30 to $100 depending on the plan you choose. If your Sidekick is $100 and your plan is $60 per month, plan on having about $200 with you to cover everything, including taxes and all those fun telecommunications surcharges that pop up at the end of phone bills. The good news is that FlexPay customers do not have to pay the standard $36 activation fee, so that will save you some money compared with a traditional plan.

Finally, you'll need to decide how you want to pay for your service every month. The easiest way is to register a credit card or a checking account and to have your monthly FlexPay payment deducted from that account. You also have the option of receiving a bill and mailing in a payment each month, but T-Mobile will charge FlexPay accounts a $5 per month "Line Control Charge" for this option. For that reason, I chose the automatic payment option and would encourage you to do the same if at all possible.

After the initial set-up, your FlexPay account will work just like a regular cell phone plan would. Each month you'll receive a payment reminder and you'll need to pay the full amount due by the due date to keep your service active. Your Sidekick will function just like any other, and no one will ever know that you are a FlexPay customer unless you tell them. T-Mobile has opened up their Sidekick service to a much wider audience by offering FlexPay to those with bad credit, and I bet their Sidekick sales will substantially increase as a result.