That stupid Tracfone of mine...

I had to charge the battery today.

Stupid, stupid, stupid! I just charged it on... January 20. Wednesday. So it lasted a measly 12 days this time.

They just don't make stuff like they used to, do they?

My new indestructible Tracfone

My old and trusty LG3200 Tracfone flip phone got itself fried in the car charger a few weeks ago, and I replaced it with an LG 100 candybar style phone. I love this phone! It's sturdy, easy to work with, has great audio and the battery life is amazing. I just recharged it after a WEEK AND A HALF of constant use and no charging! That's how long it took to run down. I have never heard of such a thing.

When you lose your Tracfone

Used to be, if you lost your Tracfone, you were out of luck. They couldn't do anything for you.

Barry's was stolen out of the Jeep a couple of days ago while he was parked in the ramp next to where he works. (Thankfully they just took the phone and charger and his hat and gloves and nothing else, and they didn't break a window to get in. So no major damage.) He discovered the theft and called for a police officer, and after filing the report, he called me to tell me about it.

I called Tracfone immediately to ask them to just cancel the phone so at least the thief couldn't do anything with it. To my surprise, the agent asked if I had another Tracfone to which she could transfer the minutes! Thankfully we had a spare, one that I had been meaning to sell on eBay and hadn't yet. I pulled it out of the box, plugged it in, and she activated it over the phone and transferred Barry's number and 800 minutes to it immediately, then flagged the stolen phone so that if anyone tries to activate it, they won't be able to without identifying themselves as Barry or me. Pretty neat.

What I have learned from this is the following:

1. Always keep a spare unactivated Tracfone around. Just a cheapie. Just so you have SOMETHING.
2. Always keep a record of the serial numbers of all your family Tracfones in a safe place.
3. Always keep an eye on how many minutes remain on each of your phones. Just a ballpark figure. If I had not known that Barry had over 800 minutes on his phone, they probably would not have done that for me. I had to tell them what I thought was on the phone, they did not volunteer the information.

One frustration as that in the time between the phone being stolen and Tracfone's shutting it down and transferring the number, the thief used it to send harrassing messages to a young lady acquaintance of his. We found out about this shortly after the number was transferred to our new phone and her frantic return messages started coming to us. Barry called her from our home and tried to explain and asked her to report it to the police, but she said she did not trust them.

Obsessing over the Phone Bill

We are a family of 5. We have a land line telephone with the phone cooperative, long distance with an 800 number through a third-party long distance company, four Tracfone cell phones and high-speed Internet through our cable company. The costs have crept up as we got more and more used to all this connectivity. Now that everybody on the planet has a cell phone or two, we have all become accustomed to instant access to anyone, anytime, anywhere, and we are mystified when we cannot reach someone in a moment. "I left a message, she'll call back" just doesn't do it anymore. No, now it's "Why isn't she picking up, already?? Where is she? I want her NOW!" And when I can't instantly get hold of one of my children, I don't like it. Not a bit.

Things came crashing down the other day when one of the Tracfones broke and Barry took a look at our usage. I keep obsessive records on our Tracfone costs because I know at some point there will be a tipping point when we would be better off with a regular cell phone plan, and I want to know the exact moment when that point comes. So when Barry asked for a report on who was using how much Tracfone time and costing what, I was able to pull up the Excel spreadsheet and tell him. Suffice to say that the person with the broken Tracfone had just plain worn it out. That person's usage was more than the rest of the family's combined. And I ain't sayin' who she is. Only she's very tall, and she's brunette, and she's not me.

Miss Tall and Loquacious is going to get her own Tracfone and be responsible for the minutes herself, and the rest of us will just coast on the minutes we have and see how it goes. We shouldn't need to buy any for quite awhile if she is counted out of the equation. But even with her usage counted in, we were running 4 cell phones for about 70 bucks a month averaged over the past 12 (and that includes buying 3 of the 4 phones), with a lot of the usage being text messages, and we couldn't touch that with any of the plans we found through conventional cellular carriers. But it put our total communications bill (counting Internet) over $160 a month! Augh!

I know, I know, somebody out there is going to say, "Lose the land lines, just go cellular." It's not a good choice for us, living where we do, where cell coverage is very patchy. It's not acceptable to me to constantly be dropping calls.

Then, the marketing people at Mediacom, our cable company, shrewdly picked this week to call and offer us telephony through their cable lines. We knew this was coming but had always been hesitant simply because Mediacom tends to have technical problems in our town. But those problems have been less and less as they replaced aged cable and switches, and service has not gone down since the middle of the summer, if I remember correctly.

They offered us local and long distance phone service, keeping our old phone number, for $9.95 a month for the first 6 months, then $29.95 a month thereafter. After we thought about this a bit, we decided to go for it. When I called back today, they had an even better offer: A penny a month for the first 6 months and $29.95 a month thereafter! We don't lose our phone number, we get unlimited calls to people we care about all over the country AND our long distance carrier said we can still keep our 800 number through them even though the bills will be so small that I wouldn't think they would even want to bother with us anymore.

So our land line costs are going from $65-65 a month down to about $15 a month for the first 6 months and then about $45 a month after that. Definitely an improvement.

What's the best deal you can get on phone service? How do you make it work with a budget? Discuss.