Pay as You Go Phones: Tracfone Comes Without a Bill but Doesn't Save a Lot of Money

I have never owned a cell phone with a monthly plan. I've never had to worry about roll over minutes, or free nights and weekends, or even a wireless network of contacts. I just want to admit that right off the bat. I have never owned a cell phone with a monthly plan or any of the special features that go with it. My friends, honestly, think I'm crazy, but the truth is, I never wanted the bill that comes with the cell phone with a monthly plan and all of the special features. Rather, I have grown accustomed to the pay as you go phones where you, literally, pay as you go. You add minutes, use them, and then add some more. The only problem with this is that I've only ever used one kind of pay as you go phone, and that is the Tracfone. It was okay for what I needed when I was younger. It was my backup emergency plan, but as my life grew and changed, I came to realize that Tracfone no longer suits my needs.

Tracfone is the most basic pay as you go phone that I have seen. You basically buy the minutes from your local Wal-Mart (or office supply stores such as Staples also carry phone minutes for these kinds of cell phones), put them on your phone with a buttons, and you have calling and text messaging capabilities on that phone until you run out of minutes. This works fine if you rarely use your phone, like emergencies, for example. Unfortunately, though, the minute cards for these phones can be quite pricey. The cheapest card you can get is twenty dollars for sixty minutes. That's around thirty-three cents a minute, when you can get minutes for other pay as you go phones for as low as ten cents a minute. Of course, you can go for a more expensive card, and that ration will change. For example, a forty dollar cad will give you two hundred minutes, which is about twenty cents a minute. Still, when compared to the phones with ten cents a minute, there is really no comparison.

The phones can come cheap, though. If you're looking for the cheapest pay as you go phone out there, the Tracfones come pretty decently priced. For a basic Tracfone, you can pay as little as ten dollars for the phone, and twenty dollars for the minutes, and have a cell phone with an hours' worth of call time. Of course, the nicer phones go up in price, but for a basic necessity, the deal isn't bad. I've always gone for the cheaper phones, because I never needed anything fancy.