Gist of this is an interesting buried T-Mobile cell-phone service,
inexpensive and month-to-month. No contract, no penalties.
Link:
How to Save on Your Cell Phone Plan with Secret No-Contract Deals
Post:
This is a guest post from social-media maven Laura Roeder. Laura first
told me this story in January, and I used it as the basis for one of
my columns for Entrepreneur magazine. Over lunch recently, she offered
to write a guest post about her experience. I told her I’d be glad to
share it.
Secret phone plans? No contracts? Unadvertised payment plans with no
interest? These are all available. But you’ll never know until you ask.
I recently decided to switch carriers to T-Mobile, so I jumped on
their website to start doing the math of the different plans that they
offered.
Just when I felt I couldn’t possibly calculate the details of one more
plan, I came across a section on the website that featured plans
without contracts. This section was buried; in fact, I had to be
logged on a friend’s account who was already a customer to be able to
see the plans at all.
I was confused by what I found. The plans withoutthe contracts had a
lower monthly cost than the plans with contracts. I figured there
would be a premium fee to not be locked in to a two-year contract, but
I was seeing just the opposite.
I went into a T-Mobile store and asked about the plans. They didn’t
show me any plans without a long contract. So I asked about a no-
contract plan but the sales person was dismissive, saying “but you’re
going to have to pay full pay price for the phone.”
I insisted that I wanted to see the plan anyway, and he went to the
back of the store to dig up the brochure for me.
The exact same plan without a contract was $110 a month instead of
$140 a month, for a savings of $360 a year. I looked for the catch,
but the only catch was the no-contract plan didn’t offer the usual
discount on a new phone.
The phone I wanted to buy retailed at $500, but cost just $200 with a
contract. (That’s a savings of $300, in case your math muscles aren’t
working.) I quickly did the math: I could save $360 per year without a
contract, but would have to pay $300 more for the phone. That still
left me with $60 in my pocket for not having a contract, meaning no
insane fees if I wanted to leave the contract or switch carriers.
Plus, everything after the first year was pure “profit”.
I soon learned from the sales associate that apparently no one had
ever bought a phone outright and taken them up on the no-contract
plan. It’s not advertised and therefore usually not asked about. They
just assume that no one will want to pay more now in order to save
later.
The sales associate couldn’t believe that I was “baller” enough (his
exact words) to pay $500 for a phone — even though I was actually
saving money within a year. He even asked me what I did for a living
to be able to afford such an extravagance!
It gets better. When he went to ring up the phone, he asked me if I
wanted a payment plan. I asked for the details and he told me that
they offer no-interest payment plans so that people don’t have to
shell out the full cost outright. Meaning that if you didn’t have the
$500 for the phone, you could still save money by going with a no-
contract plan!
Again, this isn’t advertised. You just have to ask.
It made me wonder what other companies aren’t telling me about ways
that I can save because they assume that no one wants to pay more up
front.
Call your cell phone company, cable company, or insurance company
today and ask if they have any other options. They might have
something without a contract, a AAA discount, or other ways to save.
Many companies have plans they don’t publish publicly. Check out these
past Get Rich Slowly articles for more ways to save:
Save on cell phones with employee and student discounts
Prepaid phones can save you money
Don’t Wait for a Discount — Ask for One
How I cut my cable bill by 33% without losing any service
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