Disclosure: I purchased these products, all opinions are my own. Post contains affiliate links.
A year ago we decided to ditch Verizon since our contract had expired and we were just on a month to month relationship with them. It was nice to have unlimited data, but the monthly costs for the old phones was outrageous. Hello Straight Talk. That change on it’s own cut our monthly cellphone bill down to $100 per month for 2 phones with unlimited voice, text and data. Now I’ve decided to do a little test to see if I can cut it a little deeper. So last month I decided to try and downsize a little more on the expenses that we currently pay each month.
I have been using a product from FreedomPop that allowed me to use my laptop while traveling since I didn’t want to try and tether my phone to my work laptop. The server was great and it was affordable. Since I never used up all my data the left over rolled over to next month. So every time I had to travel for work there would always be plenty of data.
So I looked to Freedom Pop for a solution to my cellphone downsizing project. I signed into FreedomPop and began researching phones. After a couple of days I finally pulled the trigger on a refurbished Samsung Galaxy S4 (my old phone is a S3) and purchased a year of service. My total investment (including phone) is: $189. This includes a year of service for: $79, the phone and $9.99 shipping costs. The plan I chose includes unlimited talk, unlimited text, 1 GB of data each month. Since I’m not usually heavy on the data this seemed like a win for me. There is one catch that I found out later but wasn’t such a big deal. To send and receive multi-media text and group texts there was an extra cost of $ 19.79 per year. Over the past month the service has worked great for me. I live out in the country so I don’t get the 4g LTE, but do get 3g. I’ve noticed that texting works great and I tend to text more than I do voice.
Over all I love the service so far and look forward to seeing how things work out this coming year.
Total costs cellphone service if paid monthly: $8.34
Current savings for the coming year: $523.92
Since I do want to save from this experience so I’ll be putting the difference into savings each month, and paying myself. What a great way to save for that next Ireland trip!
Disclosure: I purchased these products, all opinions are my own. Post contains affiliate links.