The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Ask a Mustachian => Topic started by: longtermbrian on December 01, 2014, 03:56:43 PM
-
hey mustachian brethren,
I've got an iPhone 5 & 5s on verizon. We currently pay $159/month, and my job reimburses us $150.
I'm going to be leaving my job soon, and want to get this bill down to a smaller number.
Has anyone taken their iPhone to another provider? I don't really want to leave the apple ecosystem, but I'm more than fine with keeping my iPhone for several more years. I love it, and it works great, but I want to know if anyone has a hack so that I can leave verizon and keep the phone.
brian
-
We took our iPhones from Verizon to Ting about a year ago and are very happy. With our usage, 2 iPhones is about $48/mo after taxes and fees. Since Ting runs on Sprint, we needed to swap out the phones by selling the Verizon ones and buying equivalent Sprint network ones, but luckily Ting reimburses a decent amount of the swap losses through their swap credit program.
Details here on the swap credit: https://ting.com/trade
-
Are you Iphone's unlocked? If not get them unlocked before you leave your job. Then you can use any MNVO because the Verizon Iphone have CDMA and GSM antenna's.
http://www.prepaidphonenews.com/2013/02/verizon-and-verizon-mvno-prepaid-plans.html
-
Are you Iphone's unlocked? If not get them unlocked before you leave your job. Then you can use any MNVO because the Verizon Iphone have CDMA and GSM antenna's.
http://www.prepaidphonenews.com/2013/02/verizon-and-verizon-mvno-prepaid-plans.html
Verizon iPhone 5 and 5ses are factory unlocked, so there is no need to worry about that.
OP, you have a plethora of choices given the capabilities of these phones. Page Plus is an excellent option. It is a prepaid service that uses Verizon's towers, and offers LTE access so it will be a simple swap. You probably won't notice any difference in service. You can get the $29.95 plan with 1200 minutes/3000 texts/500mb of data, but the PINs used to refill your account can be bought with a discount for ~$27.50. If you can get by with that amount of minutes etc., you're looking at about $55 a month for both phones with no difference in service. The next plan up for Page Plus is the $39.95 plan with unlimited talk/text and 1gb of data.
Since the iPhones are unlocked, they can be used on domestic GSM carriers (think AT&T or T-Mobile). The 5S can be taken to any AT&T or T-Mobile MVNO (or the carriers themselves) and get full LTE. The iPhone 5 will not get LTE on any carrier aside from Verizon - it'll only get HSPA+ (sometimes marketed as "4G"). There are too many plan options to possibly cover them all here - but given the flexibility of these phones, it would be better to ask what your typical usage is for each phone? We can certainly provide better options if we know that.
-
Switching out Verizon iPhone 5/5s models for the hideously locked down Sprint ones just so you can go to one specific Sprint MVNO that's only a reasonable deal for larger family plans due to their pricing structure is shooting yourself in the foot. As Shade pointed out, these things are pretty wide open to any Verizon, AT&T or T-Mobile MVNO as they stand, zero effort to do this and no continued electronic waste churning.
As for finding a good fit, you don't need someone telling you what to do, you just need to read the guide (http://www.techmeshugana.com/theguide/), and figure out what networks have the best coverage for the areas you plan to use them the most, and just pick the best fitting plan for your needs from the providers list. Any questions after that, feel free to ask... but that'll get you 95% of the way to where you need to be on your own with a little math and some badass self control.