From the Motorola pager I had for no good reason in high school to the new iPhone *I needed* every year as a young adult, I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart (and checkbook) for wireless devices and services. Obsessing over new wireless technologies and coverage maps consumed untold hours of my time. An oddly ironic and expensive spell for an introvert that prefers not to talk on the phone and cringes at video calls.
It wasn’t until Mrs. Dress Pockets rolled into my life with her natural frugality that I learned perhaps there is a different way. What if we entertain the low end iPhone SE at $400 instead of the iPhone X (11, 12, 13, 14) at $1,000+ that unlocks with a face I’d rather keep hidden? We can buy 2 devices for the price of 1 which is helpful when middle school kids believe a supercomputer in their pocket is an unalienable birthright.
What if we were to extend those same frugal device choices to cell phone services? Do I really need unlimited voice and data when I still prefer not to talk on the phone and 90+% of my data is using wifi in my house? It was a Mrs. Frugalwoods uber frugal month challenge that first convinced me to try MVNOs (mobile virtual network operators). These are simply companies that resell minutes, texts and data on the big 3 national carrier networks (AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon).
In 2017, I paid Verizon $45 per month for 1 prepaid cell phone service line before dropping that down to $33 per month in 2Q 2018. In December of 2018, I added a Simple Mobile prepaid service line for $23 per month because they threw in a free iPhone SE for daughter #2. So now I’m paying $56 per month for 2 lines. Not terrible and certainly cheaper than $50 per line the big carriers were touting at the time.
In September 2019, I finally bit the bullet and ported my Verizon line to Ting for a month or two. The service was fine but I wasn’t able to see the savings for the micromanaging of minutes, text and data required. Then an obscure article on the interwebs tipped me off to a frugal Iowa City family using Tello. Here I could pay $7 per month (with taxes) for 100 minutes, unlimited texts, and 500MB of data.
Now we’re talking. I ported from Ting to Tello and daughter #2 followed me as soon as her 1 year at Simple Mobile was up. Today I pay $14 per month for 2 lines. Compared to $56 per month that’s a savings of $500 per year or a new iPhone SE every year.
Too extreme for those of you who find enormous value in unlimited 5G and subsidized iPhone rentals? Give Tello or any other MVNO a try for a child who certainly won’t use any minutes nor much data apart from wifi. One last Tello hack I discovered via the reddits is if you manually renew your service the day before it auto renews then you get rollover minutes and data. A neat trick for 29 days of service instead of 30 days and one I do with rolling monthly reminders on my phone.
