I have had cellular phone service with many different companies over the years, but none has kept me as happy as Cingular has, thus far, with their family plan. With the Cingular family plan, we have one main plan, deciding how many minutes we may use per month, and then each additional line is only $9.99 per month, and we share the minutes on the original plan. It works out great, especially having kids. Before, the kids were on the prepaid wireless plans, but we kept running into problems, such as, with my fourteen year old son (the social butterfly of the family), we would buy $50 worth of time, and within a week, we would be trying to reach him while he was out, and his phone would be out of time already! It was so frustrating! With the Cingular plan, we were able to eliminate this problem with a variety of different means. First, we put an individual text messaging plan on this phone. It wasn't much at all, and as we all know, our teens LOVE to send text messages! Second, several of his friends, along with us, and his dad and step-mom are all on Cingular, so it doesn't use any minutes for us to talk to each other, with their "in calling" feature. Another huge benefit is that, for a very low fee, we get free nights and weekends that start at seven pm. Well, the kids are in school until 3:30, so they know that they can use the home phone all they want until 7pm, and then they can call whoever they want on their cell. The obvious benefit is the free weekend calling, as that is when they are out of school, and talking on the phone, the most!
With each of us having our own individual plans previously, you can imagine how much we were spending. We have now cut our cell phone bills down to nearly a third of what they were before.
I think this is definitely a necessity when you have teens on cell phones... it's a life saver, and a huge money saver!!!
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