For months we’ve been trying to discover a way to reduce our mobile/cell phone service without compromising on the quality of service, etc. The issue is that one of us uses 200+ minutes per month minimum, the other maybe 50 at most. We’ve been using a Verizon Family Plan for a while that had a base price of $69.99, plus $9.99 for the extra line, plus all the other charges, surcharges, tax etc. It usually ended up being $95-$100/month because of the 18% combined taxes and surcharges.

We find this amazingly costly for such occasional use. We considered many alternatives and finally found that the best option for us was to keep one of us on a Verizon “post-paid” (ie. contract) plan and the other we moved to a pre-paid service. There’s an immediate savings with pre-paid of not paying the surcharges that are customary with contract plans.

We were about to purchase a new pre-paid phone/service with Verizon, but we were wanted to keep our phone number and our phone. After calling Verizon and putting up with their salesperson’s shenanigans to try to convince us that this was not a good move, we were able to get them to admit it was possible and instruct us what to do.

Here’s what was required to turn a contract plan into a pre-paid plan:

1. Our contract date end date had already expired. You cannot do this without early termination fees otherwise.
2. We were told by the rep on the phone that we MUST take the phone to a Verizon Store to do this – not a reseller, etc. but a VZW-branded store. I don’t know if this was just a ploy, or truly required.
3. We then had to maintain our position with the in-store reps that this was what we wanted to do, and further resist additional efforts to get us to stay on more expensive plans. We chose the “Core” version of the Verizon Impulse plan because it includes unlimited mobile-to-mobile with other vzw users, only costs $.99/day that the phone is used, and $.10/minute for all other minutes. Since we use about 5o minutes a month for this phone, that should be less than $7/mo. since many of the minutes used are mobile-t0-mobile.
4. The rep then disconnected the existing number and reserved it (requiring a call into some sort of main office), then re-established the phone number as a new pre-paid service.
5. This required the purchase of airtime credit. One can choose differing amounts. We chose $50 in order to have 90 days to use those minutes.
6. The whole process took 10-15 minutes and cost nothing outside of the minutes purchased.

Watch out for these gotchas
Tricky numbers: In the above process, we noticed that the Verizon rep on the phone used the most expensive pre-paid options when “doing the numbers” to show us how pre-paid would be more expensive. Therefore, they used the $3.99/day option when comparing cost. Don’t let this fool you – it’s a sales trick. Further, they also don’t consider the true cost of contract plans with the included surcharges and fees. These don’t exist in pre-paid accounts. In our state, contract taxes and fees tend to be about 18%. Pre-paid reduces that down to 6% in PA and is also on the minutes purchased, not on a contract fee, therefore it’s less taxes paid than in a contract unless our pre-paid usage exceeds a contract price (which is very unlikely).

Verizon Impulse Pre-paid plans compared: The in-store rep recommended a “cheaper” plan with no per-day charges, but a per minute cost of $.25 all the time. This might also appear good to those with poor math/observation skills, but that makes the minutes cost 250% more per minute than the other plans – all to avoid a $1 charge for using the phone that day. Consider this example: A 20 minute call with $.25/minute/$0 per-day charge would cost $5.00. The cost to make the same call with the $.10/minute/$.99/day plan would cost $2.98 – that’s 40% cheaper!  Unless all your calls tend to be less than 4 minutes or less (breaking even with the $1/day plan), it’s not a good bargain to go with the $.25/minute plan. Consider yourself forewarned!