Bought New Cel Phones Today

My wife and I had a good laugh today.  You see, we have been needing to buy new cellular phones for quite a while.  Her’s is falling apart and doesn’t hold much of a charge and mine won’t allow you to charge it unless it’s in the car.  We’ve been dealing with that for well over 7 months but haven’t wanted to pull the trigger on new cel phones.  Why?  Well, for a few reasons:

-I hate the idea of being locked in to another cellular contract

-I haven’t wanted to spend the money on new phones

-I know as soon as I buy new phones and get locked in to a contract, the coolest phone ever created will come out.

-It’s a hassle to deal with

We could have upgraded to new phones last August.  As of last August, our 2 year contract with Sprint had ended and they were more than happy to sign us up for another two years.  Overall we have been happy with Sprint.  I can’t complain about the price since we get a large discount off our plan (due to my company) and the cellular reception has really been quite good, so we decided to sign back up with Sprint again.  Hopefully I won’t regret it later.  We considered going with Verizon, but a comparable plan was more expensive and it would be even more of a hassle to port our numbers over there.

Here’s what we got:

Shared minutes between two phones

550 anytime minutes

Nights and weekends starting at 7:00pm

Free CDMA roaming

Notice there is no “texting” in there.  We are way too cheap to splurge for texting.  That would cost us an additional $10 per month and that’s only for 300 text messages per phone.  In case you aren’t aware of how they calculate the messages, every message that comes in, or goes out counts as a message and goes towards your 300 limit.  Here’s an example of a conversation my wife and I might have:

Me: Hi!

My Wife: How are you?

Me: Fine

My wife: Great!

Me: Nice talking to you!

My Wife: Nice talking to you too!

That little conversation just cost me 6 of my 300 text messages.  (Okay, maybe I should have made the conversation a little juicier, but you get the point)  You can see that if you use texting very often, it would be very easy to lose track of how many messages you’ve exchanged and you could lose your shirt.  A coworker of mine recently received a bill for $100+ for text messaging.  I recommended that she look in to the unlimited plan since she uses it so much.  She called Verizon and was able to lower her plan to around $80 per month.  That still seems ridiculously high for one phone.  All together, for two phones, we’ll be able to keep our bill at around $50 per month.

So, why were my wife and I laughing today?  Well, we just wondered how many other people would have wasted this much brain power to buy two new phones.  Oh, and “buy” is probably not the right word.  We “acquired” the free ones.