It’s true, cell phone plans today can be crazy expensive. Yet it is nearly impossible to live without a mobile phone. They have become more indispensable than land lines. An internal survey of employees at one Fortune 500 company found that roughly half of all respondents no longer had a landline and, instead, relied exclusively on their cell phone as their only personal contact number.
So what do you do if you are budget minded or you simply aren’t much of a phone person? You cannot justify spending big bucks on a little used service, yet you cannot afford to be without one. For many people, the best answer turns out to be a prepaid plan. Prepaid cell phone plans are not what they used to be and neither are the phones. Plans have evolved to better fit the needs and habits of the consumer and their is greater variety of plan types and phone features available than ever before. Plus the logistics of how to use and manage airtime are increasingly user friendly and flexible, from refill cards available at popular stores to Internet based refill options to phoning it in, the convenience and ability to tailor it to your own lifestyle are astonishing.
In short, prepaid phone users are no longer second class citizens of the phone world. T-mobile even offers 4G smartphones without an annual contract on a prepaid basis. Yes, these are phones that come with talk, text, and web service. You get the works. Prepaid may still be budget friendly but it is no longer synonymous with “cheap” equipment or service. The freedom and flexibility of prepaid may be just as big a draw for many people as the ability to fit the plan to a particular budget.
In this day and age where technology and lives can both move at lightening speed, the freedom from a long term contract and ability to move on at will to a newer or simply different phone or make service adjustments also has a strong appeal for many people. It can also be a relatively painless way to put a teenager’s phone budget on a leash without having to fight with them about it. If they are out of minutes, they are done talking until you refill it, unless they want to cough the dough themselves, which mom and dad probably won’t mind.
