who's on pre pay...

[flyboy]

who has a pay-as-you-go mobile phone? and is it existant in america? we in england have a e-top up 'swipe' card where you take it to a newsagents or were ever they do top ups,and say you want to put £5 credit on your phone,they 'swipe' the card and you hand them the money and then £5 or whatever you paid is credited to your phone. then you have £5,£10,£15,£20, or wat ever you paid worth of talk time! on my price plan, the first 3 minutes of every day are 30p per minute,then after 3 mins it drops down to 5p per minute.and my txts are 12p for the first 3 then after that, they drop down to 9p per txt.its pretty good really.

[darth los]

who has a pay-as-you-go mobile phone? and is it existant in america? we in england have a e-top up 'swipe' card where you take it to a newsagents or were ever they do top ups,and say you want to put £5 credit on your phone,they 'swipe' the card and you hand them the money and then £5 or whatever you paid is credited to your phone. then you have £5,£10,£15,£20, or wat ever you paid worth of talk time! on my price plan, the first 3 minutes of every day are 30p per minute,then after 3 mins it drops down to 5p per minute.and my txts are 12p for the first 3 then after that, they drop down to 9p per txt.its pretty good really. Pre paid is a scam. Even if you use your phone sparingly it always seems to come out more than $30 which is what the cheapest plans for most cell phone companies cost.

[flyboy]

yeah it does tend to get exspensive.

[darth los]

instead of paying all up front they nickle and dime you to death. It is possible to die by a thousand cuts you know.

[MissJacksonCA]

Pre-Paid phones are like check cashing companies and payday loan agencies. They're capitalizing on people who simply dont have the credit or ability to get an account on their own. For instance I had no credit years ago... and I mean none. I had a bank account since I was 8 and a savings since then and I owned stocks but no one was banging down my door to offer me credit. I figured because of the size of my accounts I would get a cell phone and lo and behold all the major carriers in the states wanted me to give them a deposit of nearly $500 dollars. I was incensed! I wound up not getting a phone because i'm a cheapo and yada yada I have one now with Verizon and just found out the douche at my local store effed up my account and my dumbass boyfriend didn't look over the bill so I paid out $300 dollars for him not looking at his bills. Jackass! Oh but yes pre-paid phones... we have several kinds here in the states... There's Boost Mobile, Virgin Mobile, and TracPhone as the leaders of the pack... you buy their phone and then buy top-up cards for denomonations of $10,$20,$50, etc... and then you basically pay a expensive rate for the first several minutes of every call and then a more reasonable rate after that. Its typically more expensive than a phone contract you could get with a cell phone carrier because companies are making a plush living by screwing over the low-income and bad-credit population of America which together is about a total 70% of the country. The other pre-paid phone options are by Sprint, and AT&T and they basically offer you several plans and if you buy their phone and give them your bank account information they'll deduct it from your account. Its more reasonable than the pre-pay services above because it requires you have a bank account and the other companies again... are capitalizing on people who have bad credit and low incomes and even illegal aliens. The pre-pay phones are obviously a scam but regular cell companies are scammers to.

[darth los]

It's the lesser of 2 evils. if you have bad credit the only thing a cell provider would do is make you pay for the actual handset when you enter into a contract.