Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chopping Down Costs & Fat

I've spent a lot of time talking about how gym memberships are a complete waste of time and money. For most people, they make about as much sense as skipping all your errands to spend the day taking joyrides up and down a toll road. The fact is, we all have chores that need to get done around the house which all represent opportunities for exercise and cost savings by not paying someone else to do them for you. They may not be as physically demanding as splitting wood, but they all involve doing things that need to get done anyway and, more importantly, occupying your time by doing something other than eating, the leading cause of fatness. Now, I'm not proposing that you start tilling your garden with a fork just to keep yourself out of the kitchen. There's always a delicate balance between efficiency, exercise, cost savings and enjoyment of the task at hand when deciding where to spend extra money for efficiency's sake. For example, I know that I could get my...
Post a Comment
Read more

Low Tech, The New High Tech

It's funny how we've grown so accustomed to having modern conveniences do things for us that doing things the old way becomes an unheard of, revolutionary act. We get so wrapped up in the ways the health industry has told us how to live healthfully - usually involving big cash outlays for gym memberships, expensive in-home exercise equipment or premium health foods that we develop a tunnel vision to their self-serving fitness paradigm and cannot understand why it barely works or not at all. We keep blasting away at the square peg in the round hole because brute force is how you achieve your goals. "Hey, no pain, no gain, man" - or so they tell us. And, I say this as someone who currently owns 3 workout machines and who once bought an ab-roller. Now, don't get me wrong: like any activity, workout machines and gym memberships can be great supplements to the Cheapo lifestyle if you apply all the other blocking and tackling principles of nutrition management that th...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Second Look at Exercise

I'll be a first time dad in the next week or two, and I'm already dealing with the time crunch and cheapo routine disruptive life events. Being a cheapo means improvising, so sometimes you need to rethink methodologies to adapt to changing circumstances. My 9 month pregnant wife has been joining me on my dog walks in order to get some exercise herself, and she can't go as far as I can for as far along as she is. Also, she has a hankering for dining out more often than we normally do, so it adds a little more guesswork to my calorie estimates when my margins are already running pretty thin. Add in doctors appointments, chores and other prep tasks, and a lot of my extra time for walking is just vanishing. It's only going to get harder once this baby gets here. It's my fault for allowing my weight to run away from me such that I'm in a position now to where I'm trying to lose a lot of weight quickly before the baby arrives. I'm losing weight steadily...
Post a Comment
Read more