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What is the cheapest family cell phone plan?
Could you convince everyone to get a ham radio license?
What is that?
You take a test with the FCC and get to use ham radios to communicate. It is like CB radio
but licensed, but you can use much more powerful equipment.
I don’t think my teenagers are interested in my father’s hobby.
But it’s free!
They think I can get them cell phones for almost free.
Even Obamaphones aren’t free; you have to pay around $20 a month for them, while the
taxpayer foots the rest of the bill.
What’s a realistic and affordable cell phone option?
You can get a Tracphone for as little as ten dollars. Plans are as cheap as $7 a month.
Those plans only give you about an hour a month. I think my kids need more minutes than
that.
They have $30 plans for 200 minutes, and the kids can text message with the phones. And
you can buy additional minutes via phone cards almost anywhere.
I need a better option.
You need to go to Walmart. Their unlimited talk and text plan is $30 to $40 a month for
one phone.
I heard their unlimited data plan is on a 3G network.
OK, so you aren’t downloading movies while at work to watch on the train. But it lets
you call your kids, send text messages when bored and drop the $300 a month phone plan
you had.
I wonder about how to control the costs while retaining some flexibility.
Get a pre-paid phone. The kids then have to buy phone cards with minutes if they want
to keep chatting away.
That might be a useful incentive. Clean up your room or you can’t talk to your friends
tonight.
I wonder if they’ll figure out you still have a landline phone.
They’d go mad tethered to one spot. I heard in some countries, prepaid cell phone cards
are like a second currency.
Trade in cell phone minutes to gain access to instant communications, data and smart
phone banking. That’s common across the Third World today.
And now we’re seeing it explode here.
At least your kids can’t run up a $900 cell phone bill without paying for it themselves
anymore.