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Cheapo Hacks: The $0 Cell Phone Bill

I'm not sure that this plan works for anyone who makes a lot of calls or isn't usually in Wifi range, but otherwise, this plan is pretty solid.

My personal phone is with a company called FreedomPop. They sell lots of phones that are locked to Sprint's network, but they also sell SIM cards for unlocked phones that operate on AT&T's superior network.

You don't get a whole lot with your SIM card - 1GB of data (500Mb free plus another 500Mb once you load up your "friends" bucket - more on that later) and 200 minutes and 500 texts, which I suggest you don't use.

Instead, you can port your existing phone number over to Google Voice for a one-time fee of $20. You can use Google Hangouts to place and receive VoIP calls, and you can also link all your other phones - work, home, work mobile, etc. as forwarding numbers. So, when someone calls your cell, you just pick up whatever phone is in your closest reach. Any combination of them will ring or not based on what you have turned "on", and you can also places call from those other numbers that will present themselves as your cell phone number to whomever you're calling. You can text and send picture messages from your computer as well as your phone.

If you're making and receiving cell phone calls on the AT&T data network, you'll use about 1MB per minute, so that would get you a max of 1000 minutes per month. If you're talking over Wifi or on land or other cell phones linked with your Google Voice number, you'll be able to talk an unlimited amount.

There are still some drawbacks. FreedomPop will kind of nickel and dime you if you don't opt out of their introductory pay plan and turn off automatic top-ups if your data runs low. Also, your calling quality might be more suspect to call quality dips from bad signals than your standard dedicated 2G voice channel on a traditional cell plan. Lastly, Apple uses a weird video format that doesn't render through Google Voice when receiving video MMS messages from iPhones. But, that's really it.

Also, to get your additional 500MB of data, you have to load up your FreedomPop "friends" bucket - just connections with other FreedomPop customers. I don't even know most of my "friends". I just found a slickdeals.net forum of people looking for friends and added them. Within a few days, I had my full 500MB.

One nice advantage is dirt cheap international calling. We'll sometimes call relatives Italy for 1c per minute. Also, if you travel internationally, all you need is a local Sim card with some data on it, and your US cell number is back online and works identically to the way it does at home.

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