First, you need to calculate actual total minutes used, not just above and beyond the freebie in-network minutes - do the hard math on usage so you know what each line specifically needs. Second, you need to understand that needing to stay on a Verizon first provider with roaming, you're dealing with some of the most expensive MVNOs available. Also, if you haven't found the sticky yet, read
the guide (
unabridged here). Once you've done the math averaging and built in a little safety net on margin for total usage, you can start shopping plans.
First, we'll go over which providers to avoid. Although Ting does Verizon roaming on its CDMA network, it's Sprint first which is going to leave you without any mobile data access at all in most of the places you're wanting to be which are Verizon reception dependent. As such, definitely not worth the cost on handset replacement and the needless electronic waste generation. There's also Puppy Wireless which is a Verizon MVNO that supports LTE handset activation, but they don't do off-network roaming currently. The same can be said about BYO Wireless and the lack of off-network roaming with them as well, plus they can only activate Verizon CDMA handsets which eliminates taking LTE handset activation to them as well. I also would
highly recommend
avoiding Page Plus, Straight Talk, and Total Wireless as customer service is pretty rough and there's a lot of reasons why none of the America Movil family of MVNO brands are in the guide.
The only Verizon MVNO I'd recommend for consideration would be
Selectel combined with a
data diet (easier than you think). Both providers can activate CDMA or LTE Verizon handsets without a problem now. The only thing to take note is the lack of off-network roaming, as voice and SMS will work but not data. Check their map
here. You're probably going to want to consider going on that data diet, though.
Your FIL's handset plan will be trivially easy as their $75/year plan would be overkill. Your MIL might be able to get by on the $15/month plan combined with a Flex card to catch overages at 5¢/minute when she exceeds the 300 minute limit, so long as the numbers you quoted for her doesn't hide a huge amount of in-network call time. That puts a baseline cost of around $21.25 plus sales taxes for the in-laws plus overage.
The two of you will have to shop on data usage, and the easiest way to keep costs down will be the previously mentioned data diet. However, if you need more than 1300 minutes or 500MB of data, all the remaining plans are "unlimited" talk and text plans with between 1-5GB of data ranging between $40-70/month... so it at least simplifies the talk and text end without needing to keep track there, but it makes each line's savings dependent upon how little data you can use and/or if you can keep that data usage below 1GB or 3GB a month. All combined, at the low end you shouldn't have to spend much more than about $80/month for your two lines given each of you can potentially keep data usage below 1GB. You could each go with the $55/month plan (for a total of $110 for the two of you) which comes with 3GB of data on each line likely without any usage modification, but this community is all about minimalism and efficiency - what you're doing with your budget, you can do with your data usage as well to save
even more money. At the high end, around $140 would give the two of you each 5GB of data, but the savings is considerably less dramatic. An extra $15 savings a month between each plan level you can step down on is an extra $180 in savings a year
per line. Are the potential creature comforts of using online GPS maps and streaming media worth the extra money, especially when you can buy
an excellent offline GPS map for a one-time $30 purchase (not to mention several reasonably good free ones - including
Google Maps - depending on the smartphone OS used), and when your phone probably has plenty of room for several hours worth of music and/or podcasts that you could download at home? Excessive mobile data is more a creature comfort than a necessity, and most professionals can easily get by with less than 500MB of data a month with just a little forethought, patience and conscious usage. Just something to consider.
That should give you a direction and a ballpark range of savings between $65-130/month. Any other questions, just ask.
