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Frugality in motion is a series of posts designed to give you practical tricks and tips that you can implement in your every-day life to become more frugal and save more money.

Before I met my beautiful fiancé, I really didn’t ever use my cell-phone all that much. I had a phone in my dorm for all of my regular calls, and if I ever wanted to talk to somebody on campus, I’d just go find them or chat with them online. I didn’t have a very big need for a cell-phone, so I was able to get by paying a few dollars a month on a pre-paid phone plan. In fact there were months that I spent under $5.00 on phone service.

There’s a lot of good pre-paid phone plans out there for you to use if you don’t happen to make a lot of calls. About the best of these pre-paid plans is AT&T’s Free2Go wireless service, since merging with Cingular, they’ve now merged the prepaid options under the term “GoPhone.” The plan is a flat rate of 25 cents per minute, with no contract obligations or any sort of fees. You will have to buy yourself a cell-phone, but you can get one of those for $20.00 when you sign-up for the pay as you go service. You get nation wide coverage with this plan and there’s no activation fee.

If AT&T/Cingular’s network isn’t available to you, you might consider checking out Tracfone. Before I signed up for a modest plan with Alltel, I used Tracfone exclusively. I never paid more than $5 or $10 a month for service, and always had high-qualify service. With their service, you buy a phone at Wal-Mart or through their website, for just a few dollars. Right now they are offering the Nokia 2285 for just $9.99. You get 20 minutes of air-time and 90 days of service for signing up. If you buy a lot of minutes at once, you can pay less than 20 cents a minute under this service.

The bad part is that you have to buy a refill card every 90 days to keep your service alive. If you were to use your phone for 30 minutes a month, and bought four 120 minute cards a year, you’d only end up spending $10 a month for cell-phone usage, which is not a bad deal at all.

These pay-as-you-go cell-phone services are an excellent way for people who already have a land-line or just don’t use a lot of minutes to get some very inexpensive cell-phone service. If you talk on the phone quite a bit, you should probably go with a full-service plan from Alltel or Cingular, but if you don’t use a lot of minutes, pre-paid is definitely the way to go.



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