Tis the season for gift giving! And spending money! And jacking up credit card bills! Please don’t do that! Really, please don’t. Now, more than ever (at least since the pandemic first hit), we should know that things can change drastically and without warning. For those that missed it, although the US economy keeps adding jobs, a few big name companies are cutting jobs including 10,000 at Amazon, 4,000 at Twitter, and another 11,000 from Meta (Facebook). Given the ongoing volatility in the job market, finding ways to tighten things up financially is probably a good idea. If nothing else, it helps make ends meet if HR comes calling about salary cuts. Time for another installment of Flaunting Frugality!

Not too long ago, I was at an RV show. Although we currently have and are enjoying our Class A motorhome, our plan is to eventually build a custom RV, and these shows are great places to get ideas. Besides new RVs, they’re also loaded with vendors selling everything related including internet and cell phone services. With extended time on the road and sporadic coverage maps regardless of your provider, you really come to appreciate the reliable cell and internet service you had at home! So of course, this results in a lot of vendors pushing everything cellular related including antennas and range extenders and hotspot equipment.

As I was passing by a Verizon booth, I figured I’d browse and eavesdrop on a potential customer to find out what they were offering. Seems this customer, let’s call him Jimmy, was there with his presumed significant other talking about adding a hotspot to their RV.

The salesman started his spiel… “So, are you a Verizon customer now?”

“Yes, I’ve got blah, blah, blah (muffled, inaudible response).”

“Great; what do you pay now?”

“Right about 120.”

WTF did Jimmy just say?!? Surely, I heard that wrong.

“Maybe it’s closer to 115 a month, but somewhere in there. I’d like to get a hotspot, but can’t pay much more.”

“Oh, no problem! I think we can probably get you a hotspot for about the same price. Let me show you a couple options.”

Damn, so I did hear him correctly. For a month of service, Jimmy was paying about $120 per month! Never in the history of owning a cell phone have I ever paid more than $80 and that was back in the early 2010s. Checking out the Verizon website, it looks like they’re charging customers between $70 and $90 per month for service, plus taxes and fees. Not knowing the details of Jimmy’s bill I can only guess his area has $25 a month in taxes and fees or maybe he’s decided to finance a cell phone in that monthly bill. Regardless, it seems as though Jimmy is getting the business from Verizon and I’m guessing they didn’t include any lube with that bill.

Absorbing the cost of a phone into a cell plan was common practice in the early days and apparently it still is. If I bumped my head really hard and decided to buy a new unlocked iPhone 14 Pro Max off-the-shelf, it would cost between $1099 and $1599 depending on the amount of storage… for a cell phone… to make calls, scroll the social medias, and check email. So in order to be hella-fancy, some decide to roll up that ridiculous cost into a 2-year contract, adding $40, $50, or even more to their monthly bill. The thing is, nobody needs the latest and greatest iPhone, NOBODY! “What, you want me to slum it out and get a 2-year old iPhone 12 for about $400? I’ll look like a peasant; am I right?” (Insert sarcastic eyeroll if you didn’t catch it.) Apple is an easy target since they’ve decided to bust through the $1000 barrier, but Android phones also have their silly excesses in the $800 price range from Google and Samsung among others.

So are there cost-effective options for regular people besides carrying a busted phone with shitty coverage? F**kin’ A right!

Back in the old days, circa 2000, my soon to be wife and I purchased our first cellular flip phones through AT&T. They cost about $50 each when we signed up for a 2-year contract and the bill was around $40 per month for each phone. As AT&T was bought out by Cingular Wireless and then rebranded back to AT&T, our original bills continued to creep up in price. When Android and iPhone operating systems began to take over and the demand for data increased, cell carriers began placing data limits and increasing prices at higher tiers. Our AT&T bill hit $80 per line around 2013, and we said enough.

By that time, Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) had become a thing that allowed third parties to offer cell service through cell phone towers owned by Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile, often for much less than the big carriers. Over the next few years, we tried out Walmart Straight Talk (an AT&T MVNO), Walmart Family Mobile (a T-Mobile MVNO), and T-Mobile, each of which got us unlimited talk and text with unlimited data for about $40 per line per month; half the price of what we had been paying! Despite worries from other would-be customers, we never felt like the coverage was any different than we had experienced with AT&T. When our T-Mobile bill hit $50 per line with unlimited data, we decided another change was warranted, and switched to Metro PCS (now Metro) to drop our bill back down to $40 while keeping unlimited data on the same T-Mobile towers. After a couple of years and realizing that we only used a small amount of the unlimited data, we switched to Consumer Cellular with 2GB of data and that dropped our bill to $30 per line.

These days, we use our new favorite cell service, Mint Mobile, a T-Mobile MVNO. Amazingly, it only costs us $15 per month for each line including 4GB of 5g data per phone. Yes, we have to pay for 12 months in advance to get this price, about $200 per year including taxes and fees, but I love not having monthly bills anyway so at that cost… win-win! The two times I’ve needed to call customer service, I admittedly had to wait about 10 minutes, but then I got exactly what I needed and very quickly with an obviously foreign but well-spoken and polite representative. If I ever feel like 4GB isn’t enough, I can pay $5 more per month to upgrade to 10GB. Still not enough? Another $5 will buy me 15GB per month, and another $5 gets unlimited data. So for $30 per month, I could have unlimited everything if I ever needed it. Take that Jimmy and Verizon! And if you’re in an area that doesn’t get great T-Mobile service, there are Verizon and AT&T MVNOs also. Notice, there are no hyperlinks here? It’s because I don’t get commissions or paid to write this; I genuinely am very happy with the service and cost.

Okay, great… you can find cheap alternative service using the same network towers, but you still need a phone. Sure, you could add on a phone and finance it through your MVNO just like the big name carriers, but why? If you can’t afford to buy it with cash, don’t buy it! Rule #1 of the rich guys is to never finance a depreciating asset. If you ever want to get out of debt, it helps to eliminate any monthly bills to the extent you can because those monthly bills are what keep you locked into your 9 to 5. There are great quality phones that offer up plenty of performance for calling, surfing the web and social medias, and checking email, and you can buy them unlocked without contracts for less than a couple hundred dollars. My last three phones were unlocked and purchased like this with no contracts: a OnePlus One, a Motorola Moto G6 Play, and a Motorola Moto G7 Power. My first two unlocked phones made it to about three years each while my Moto G7 is still humming along nicely in it’s second year.

Enter the naysayers: Yeah, but I can’t post photos to Instagram with a 12 mixapixel camera, I’ll lose all my followers! I need to play Fortnite at 1000 frames per second! I think a web page stuttered when I was scrolling down once; unacceptable! Okay, so buy last year’s top of the line model on clearance for a huge discount. I’ve recently seen the Google Pixel 6 and Samsung S22 for $300-400, about half of their original list prices. If you miss the clearance of last year’s model, manufacturers usually offer a slightly lower spec just below their top-of-the-line for much less money. The relatively new Google Pixel 6a is only $300 compared to the Pixel 7’s $600 price. These phones offer most of the top model’s performance and will work perfectly fine for years. If you can use a middle of the road performance phone, the aforementioned unlocked Motorola phones can be found at Walmart in the $130-150 price range and the 5g Samsung Galaxy A13 is just under $200.

So circling back to Jimmy at the Verizon booth, the dude’s got options. If he lives in an area where only Verizon’s network will do, he could switch to Visible, which matches Mint’s $30 a month for unlimited everything service. If he found T-Mobile’s network is good for his area, he could switch to Mint for between $15 and $30 a month, depending on how much data he needs. If he needs a hotspot to control wireless in his RV and he chose a carrier that doesn’t offer that directly (like Mint), he could buy a cheap 5g unlocked phone for much less than a Verizon 5g hotspot, and keep it in his RV plugged into an outlet to use as a hotspot with unlimited data for $30 a month through either Mint or Visible. Then he could switch his regular phone to Mint Mobile with a lower tier data plan for $15 a month and tether it to his “hotspot” when he’s in the RV. After this, Jimmy would have dropped his monthly bill from $120 to $45 a month (including $15 for personal cell service plus $30 a month for the “hotspot” service); about 1/3 the monthly bill he was paying with Verizon.

I’m sure there are a lot of folks, just like Jimmy, that may not even know they have options, so here they go:

• https://www.wired.com/story/guide-to-mvno-phone-plans/, and
• https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/best-mvno/.

If your phone is already unlocked, you’re halfway there. If not, call your current carrier and ask if you can have your phone unlocked (you may have to wait or buy out your current contract and/or phone, depending on what you signed up for). Then grab a sim card from an MVNO that uses the same carrier or band (either GSM or CDMA) as your current phone, and port your existing phone number over to the new service. Boom! Savings! If you decide you don’t like it, try a different MVNO or switch back to the big name carrier. They’ll be happy to take back your business and your money.

Good luck spending less money this holiday season!