Anatomy of a cell phone bill (with a teenager on the plan)

[samnewsom]

we have cellular south 45 a month unlimited talking and unlimited text awesome

 

[fishb0y]

Yet another reason why my 12-year old is not getting a phone.

 

[Mauifish]

My daughter is 18, is still in school/apprenticeship, has her own place and pays for everything....when she went on her own it was a reality check, but a real lesson learned.

My daughter is 20 and she still hasn't accomplished that kind of responsibility, want to trade?

 

[justleesa]

want to send her to my boot camp

 

[Mauifish]

I only wish!!

 

[almitywife]

what i really find annoying about the text messages is you have about 180 characters to use for an entire message but when i ask almitychild a question all i get back is "K"

whats with the one letter answers?

i tell her 'you get charged whether you use 1 or 180 letters' but i still only get "K" as a response

Fairy - whats the boy going to do in Dec while we're diving??????

 

[fairybasslet]

Fairy - whats the boy going to do in Dec while we're diving??????

Hopefully, he'll be away in college. If he gets into any mischief while I'm gone, he'll be 18 and then he can call his friends to bail him out.

 

[Cacia]

Yet another reason why my 12-year old is not getting a phone.

I wanted to do that but it was so convenient for me when I had to pick them up or meet them somewhere.

My kids were taking the bus all over town in Santa Barbara when they were 8 and ten.

I needed to track them "okay, I am getting on bus # 6 right now."

I took the phone away a couple times and it almost shut my life down..did not know where they were, inconvenient, etc.

 

[mdb]

# of pages with my activity: 2
# of pages with my teen's activity: 21
# of my text messages: 12
# of my teen's TM's: 493.

TG for unlimited TM plans. They are now 15 cents each.:11: Oh, and rollover minutes, they come in handy too.

fairybasslet: Your bill is IMO fairly typical for any parent with teens. One of our sons spent a junior year abroad in Italy. Of course he made a nice Roman girlfriend. We changed our land line phone to a plan that allowed for 10 cent a minute calls to Italy. For some reason he thought the plan included our cell phones-Verizon. One month we got a bill for $2026.96. After much back and forth with Verizon they settled for $600.

It took the good lad all summer working as a waiter to pay off his debt.

 

[almitywife]

i agree with Catherine. almitychild is now 13 and takes 2 buses to get to her school - there are too many "what ifs" for her not to be in contact with everyone.

those prepaid phones are great - good value