Scott & Amy Phone Home . . . Or Not

The biggest pain in our patootzkies regarding our pre-trip preparations has been trying to find a cell phone. Neither of us carries one now and we have no interest in signing a contract to do so in the future. So we’ve been looking into prepaid options.

We confess to being a bit bothered and confused by all of this.

We have a phone. It is a Verizon phone. It belonged to Scott’s mother. We actually used it on our last trip (she let us borrow it). Scott cancelled the contract in March. We wanted to know if we could use this as a prepaid phone, saving us the cost of a new one (and for people who don’t use cell phones, do we really need two of them?). Apparently only Verizon can do that. It would cost us $85 to have a phone for a month with Verizon: a “one time” activation fee of $35 then $50 for some number of minutes (350 maybe?). If we don’t spend $50 more by the end of the month, the phone dies – whether we’ve used the minutes or not – and we’d need to pay the “one time” activation fee again should we ever want to use the phone in the future (like, say, on next year’s trip). And we can’t get a phone number that would be a local call for Amy’s mother. Scott has a philosophical issue with paying $85 for one month of phone service.

Any other option would involve buying a new phone. That doesn’t necessarily mean it would cost more, though, which is scary. Scarier still are the limitless options. The big companies have plans (T-Mobile had a confusing array of choices) as do a number of smaller carriers that piggyback on the networks run by the behemoths. We were about to pull the trigger on a Tracphone but then we ran across this complaint site (#2 on Google search for Tracphone).

The reality seems to be we’re going to get hosed. The question is just how do we want to get hosed? Do we want to pay $1 a day whether we use the phone or not? Do we want to pay for scads of minutes that will disappear? Do we want to have a second dead cell phone in the house when we’re done?

Any suggestions? Drop us an email.

Absent input from the peanut gallery (that would be you), we will either go with T-Mobile, or a Tracphone on Wednesday evening depending on which way the coin lands.