Reality Check is a recurring feature here on RLF where I will look at one of the monthly spending categories I listed when figuring out our monthly expenditures, and break it down a little further, exploring options for cutting the expenditure down. Today's expenditures: cell phones.
We have been with our carrier, T-Mobile, on a family plan for years. I can't even tell you how long. My husband, my oldest son, and me are on the plan together (our middle-schooler doesn't get a cell phone until he reaches high school). It is such an old plan that it doesn't even have a fancy name. We share 400 minutes a month and my son has 400 text messages a month. Total bill with all the taxes is right around $81/month.
We use the cell phone for all our long distance, and even so, with three of us on the plan, we never come close to the 400 minutes. I guess we aren't chatty types. My husband uses his cell phone the very least (maybe if he could actually feel the phone when it is set to vibrate, he'd answer it more often...but that's beside the point); in fact, on the bill we received right after my layoff, he used three (3) minutes!
I researched a variety of plans from a variety of carriers online and talked with representatives from T-Mobile and TracFone (which I was considering getting for my less-than-talkative husband), and was unable to come up with a cheaper plan. This is primarily because no one offers a family plan with such a low number of minutes anymore. If we had moved my husband off of the family plan onto a prepaid plan, T-Mobile's plan ($10 for 30 minutes that expire after 90 days) was better than TracFone's, but it still would have saved us only $20 every 3 months. However, we won't do that now because my husband stepped up the pace, and used 27 minutes on our most recent billing cycle.
Sometimes it seems like a disadvantage, having already been trying to live reasonably frugally prior to the layoff, because there are fewer "luxuries" to trim. Really, the only way we could cut down our cell phone bill would be to get rid of cell phones altogether. I'm not ready to take that plunge just yet. With a teenager who will be driving this summer, and who is already supremely busy, having that easy way to be in contact is a mind-easer.
