Tracfone

[foxtrapper]

Do you only pay for the minutes you actually use with the tracphone?
I have a cell phone I pay for just carrying it even when I am not talking..

You buy the phone with so many minutes and an expiration date. At the end of that expiration date, you can renew and carry the existing minutes over.

I've had a tracfone for years. Works well for me. I go through a few hundred minutes throughout the year. Works a little less well for my wife, as she talks on hers more than I do. So I have to purchase more minutes for her phone than mine. But it's still a savings compared to any other contract phone service.

Coverage with Trac is excellent imo. I've had Cincular, AT&T, Verizon and maybe some others. None of them had as good a coverage as Trac. Oh, there are certainly dead spots, but they are small and down in geographic holes and such. Coverage is nation wide, so you don't get into roaming charges and such.

If you're interested in a tracfone, buy it online from trac. The deals are much better than at the retail stores.

[cincinnati]

There are so many ways to buy airtime. I buy the one year service card for $100 so I don't have to fool with it for a whole year. Now if you run out of minutes before your year\days of service ends you will need to buy another card. Any time you buy a card it extends your days of service. It can sound confusing but it's not once you do it.
I have used a tracfone for years and the price has stayed the same but they keep increasing the minutes. When I started the year card was only 250 minutes. Now it's 400 min + I purchased a double the minutes card 2 years ago so I get 800 min total. Some new phones come with the double min card free so look for that. If not the double min card is $25. (it was $50 when I purchased it 2 years ago)


My mom uses her phone less than me so she likes to buy her time every 90 days.

You can buy a card on-line but that is just kinda a figure of speech. You pick the card you want, type in your phone serial number and they automatically send the minutes to your phone just as if you received a tex message.
You can even buy time right on your phone but I never have done that.

[twalz68225]

I use a Virgin Mobile phone. I think I paid $15 for the phone and it costs me $15 every 3 months (plus tax). So, it's a bit over $5 per month. Then, when you use the phone, it costs 25 cents per minute. So, your $5 gets you 20 minutes of talk time....plenty for an emergency phone. And, the money keeps accumulating. I have over $90 worth of credit on mine now.

[fixit]

I do the same with my Virgin Mobil phone. However, I'm seriously considering moving to a cell phone permanently and cancelling my land line phone. When you do that you have to be careful you don't leave a large balance on your Virgin Mobile phone because they DON'T refund the balance in your account.

I'm using up the minutes on my phone and will cancel my phone when I transfer the number to the new cell phone.