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(Excerpted from Stop Getting Ripped Off) Poor Joan Richer. She made a host of missteps on her way to the wireless store. You probably spotted a lot of them, but I’ll bet some of them would have fooled you, too. The first, of course, was shopping with her very persuasive children. But close behind was signing up for a new cell phone service right before her family went on vacation. Many, many elements go into providing a reliable signal for cell phone reception. No one can tell you, definitively, that your phone will work in the places you need it most often – on your back deck, in the car along your route to work, at grandma’s nursing home. The best you can do before you sign up for a new service is talk with friends in these various locations and ask how reliable their service is. But even that that won’t give you a definitive idea if the service will work for you. For that, you must conduct a test drive. The most important thing a cell phone consumer can do is run their phone through the ringer in the first few days after purchase. Try out the phone alone your commute route, at Grandma’s house, in your basement rec room, or anywhere else you’ll really need it. Free return periods can be as short as 14 days. After that, cell phone contracts are harder to break than most marriage licenses. That 14-day window is a very short honeymoon period, so take advantage of it. Never get a new cell phone service right before you leave for vacation, or at any other time when you can’t put it through the paces of your normal work/play routine. Unwieldy text message plans are the bane of many parents’ existence today. Kids have the ability to send far more text messages than most parents could possibly imagine. The average young teen sent 1,742 texts each month in 2008. That’s nothing compared to the 14,528 texts sent by 13-year-old Reina Hardesty of Silverado, Calif., during in a single month in 2008. That’s 484 messages per day . She would have blown past a 250-message plan by lunchtime on the first of the month. Fortunately, Hardesty’s dad had an unlimited text message plan, but don’t be fooled by that name! Unlimited text messaging refers only to standard texts. There is an entirely different type of texts called “premium” texts, and these can cost $1 or more per message. Online game shows use them, seedy ringtone subscription services use them, and strange teen-ager dating services use them. As you read in the quote at the beginning of this chapter, I once interviewed a man whose daughter had rung up nearly $10,000 in text charges in a single month before he discovered the problem – and he was paying for unlimited texts at the time. Obviously, that’s incredibly unfair. No gadget should give a teen-age child the ability to spend thousands of dollars of their parents’ money without consent. But this is the reality of our time. Many providers will now allow you to turn off premium text messaging services, and you should. If not, give your kids a stern talking to when they get their hands on a phone. As a general rule, remember that cell phone companies are constantly trying to shrink the distance between the cell phone in your front pocket and the wallet in your back pocket. Here’s one Joan Richer never thought of. When she called up her previous cell phone provider to cancel the service, the company would have insisted that she pay for nearly an extra month of service. Why? That’s standard policy. Cell phone providers bill customers in advance. That means you pay March 1 for your March service. So even if you cancel on March 4, and even if your phone is deactivated that day, you must still pay clear through until March 31. That’s an extra 27 days of revenue the company collects, a kick in the pants on the way out the door. It’s wrong, of course – how can they charge without providing service? – but right now, no one is stopping them. One fee the Richers didn’t have to pay, but they will in the future, is the “upgrade fee” charged when consumers get new phones for the same service. Think of it as a loyalty fee. When people decide to stay with their cell phone provider, and get a new phone, the provider will charge an $18-36 upgrade fee -- over and above the price of the phone. To make things even more murky, the fee often appears two to three months after the phone purchase. Why isn’t the upgrade fee simply part of the price? That question should also be asked about those $35 activation fees, too. After all, the phone companies have no desire to sell phones that don’t get activated. It’s deceptive to not include the price of turning on the phone with the price of the phone. You should ask about it; ask for it to be waived; and at least make sure to include the price – normally $35 – in your computations when deciding on the best deal. Of course, the central trouble with cell phones is the ridiculous nature of their pricing, which boils down to this: “We’ll charge our best customers the worst prices!” Customers pay for an arbitrary amount of calling minutes during arbitrarily-picked times. Then, they are extorted an outrageous amount for excesses. In fact, “excess” minutes are typically charged at a rate that’s 600 to 800 percent higher than in-plan minutes. This is a game consumers can’t win, because in most services, unspent minutes go into cell phone never-never-land. That leaves the most practical advice for consumers at this: when picking a plan, you are safer taking the “insurance” – the most minutes you’ll need. Yes, you will essentially be paying extra for “protection.” But at least this way you’ll have a steady bill, and you’ll avoid the surprise $400 cell phone bill. Some cell phone providers offer a little-known feature to combat this kind of minute waste. Verizon, for example, will let customers call in the middle of the month to upgrade their plans…and then allow a downgrade later on. This feature comes in handy if you have a family crisis and then suddenly find yourself making 1,500 minutes of calls. It’s always worth calling and asking about a temporary plan change if you are in a situation like that.
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