I’m all about saving money. Since I’ve taken on my new job with a smaller paycheck my wife and I took a closer look at our expenses and decided to try and cut out some fat. So we paid off some student loans, tightened up our spending habits and now have switched to a prepaid phone plan. This is a bit of an experiment for us, as we’ve never done a prepaid plan before. Since our engagement basically we have had a family plan with multiple carriers over the years. I am curious if any one of you have tried, or do, the same thing and what your experiences have been.

Our reasoning for the change

We’ve had a family plan with the least amount of minutes we could get for years now. Every single month we had leftover minutes. Hundreds of them. Usually about half of what was available at the beginning of the month. Also we’ve been paying for unlimited SMS, but probably using less than 1,000 between the both of us in a month (likely even half of that). I have a smartphone and was paying for unlimited data, of which I maybe used 500mb a month on average. Considering all of these things we decided that the plan we had was WAY more than we needed.We could cut features, but that would only save us about $20 a month. So what else could we do?

I researched prepaid mobile

It turns out that in situations such as the one we find ourselves in prepaid cellular can be a pretty sweet deal. We paid about $65 to get our plan started, which should give us enough data, text messages and minutes to last us the entire month. Assuming we have some left over before the month is up we can roll over any remaining balances by keeping our prepaid mobile plan “paid up.” Worst case scenario though I’m figuring we’ll usually be fine with about $60 dollars or so a month to cover all the minutes, texts and data we’ll need. If we can save a decent amount of minutes, text messages and data we can probably keep it even lower than $50 a month!

Sacrifices will have to be made

There’s not usually a reward without some sort of sacrifice. This is no different. The prepaid plan we went with isn’t offered in the family variety, so we no longer share minutes or texts. That also means we have two phone bills every month, instead of one. A slight nuisance, but nothing I can’t live with. I can automate it after all. Another sacrifice is that, at least to get things started, we’ll have to be careful and watch our minutes, watch our texting, and for me, watch my data usage. As I said earlier this is a bit of an experiment. One that I am confident we can make work and if it does we’ll have cut our phone bill in half, if not more.