Verizon Basic Prepaid Cell Phone Plan: New Option for Infrequent Users

My husband and I went shopping for a cheaper cell phone plan the other day, and found a prepaid plan that was perfect for us!

Don't get me wrong - I love my cellphone, and wouldn't want to give it up for anything. But neither my husband nor I use our wireless phones a lot, and it has always been frustrating for us to pay $90 a month on a "family plan" for the "privilege" of using our cell phones maybe 60-90 minutes a month! That's $1.00 per minute, and that is expensive!

But now, our preferred wireless carrier, Verizon Wireless, has a new basic prepaid cell phone plan that is perfect for people like us. As explained on the MobileTechNews website: "The new Prepaid Basic plan is designed for the infrequent wireless user. With this plan, there is no daily access fee - customers simply pay $0.25 per minute of talk and $0.20 per text message sent and received."

And that says it all! I'm not sure what is classified as "infrequent", but for us, being on these new prepaid phone plans should cut our cell phone bill in half!

When Verizon rolled out this new Prepaid Basic plan in February of 2009, they also rolled out a couple of other plans that may be more to your liking, depending upon how much you use your cell phone. They have a Prepaid Unlimited Talk plan for heavy cell phone users who don't want to be tied down with a contract. You pay $3.99 per day access fee for unlimited calls, with text messages only costing $.01. You are only charged the $3.99 on days when you use your cell phone, so this might be the perfect plan for business people who use their phones a lot during the week, but not much on the weekends. They also have their Prepaid Plus with $1.99 daily access fees, and their Prepaid Core with $.99 daily access fees. Check their website (see Sources section below for the URL) for more details.

We are also making one additional concession to our "cell phone lifestyle" to make sure that we keep our cell phone usage at a reasonable level, and that change is to use our land line phone when we are at home.

A lot of younger mobile phone users don't even have land line phones anymore, but for us baby boomers, it is difficult to think about giving up this standard "appliance" in our homes. And if we are going to be paying for our land line phone anyway, we should make an effort to use it when we are at home, right? So I will now be having my hour long monthly chat with my sisters on my land line phone, instead of my cell. And my husband and will be calling back friends and family on our land line phone if they happen to call us on our cell phones while we are at home.

I personally see the prepaid wireless plans becoming much more popular with the older generation, with those who do not use their cell phones a lot, or those of us who are "so over" all the "gee whiz" bells and whistles that attracted many of us to cell phones in the first place. As millions of us are losing our jobs, or having our discretionary spending budget cut drastically, we now look at cell phones as an extreme convenience and a marvelous option -- one that we would not want to give up if we could help it -- but not the absolute necessity we may have once thought them to be. I also see wireless service providers realizing that fact and coming out with more options to attract customers.

Keep in mind that there may be penalties for leaving your current plan if you are not at the end of your contract. We paid $140 to get out of ours. But we will make that up in just a few months on this new prepaid plan. If you are unhappy with the money you are paying for your wireless cell phone plan, it might pay to check out your carrier's website to see if they are now offering more economical prepaid options!

Sources:

Verizon Wireless website - Prepaid Plans: http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/splash/prepay.jsp

MobileTechNews website - "Verizon Wireless offers new prepaid calling plans", 2/12/2009 http://www.mobiletechnews.com/info/2009/02/12/130825.html