Nov 08
14
How much is a cell phone number worth?
That’s the question I am asking myself at this point. I am currently with Sprint and my wife is on AT&T, and I was looking into porting my number over to AT&T and then putting the two lines on a share plan. My current monthly charge through Sprint alone is $38.49 plus tax, my wife’s monthly charge through AT&T is $30.79 plus tax. By combining the lines under a share plan, the cost would be $56.19 plus tax, a savings of $13.09 a month. Sounds great – sign me up!
Oops, there is a wrinkle in the story. Our cell numbers are in two different area codes in different states, and AT&T cannot combine the two lines with numbers based in different markets under the same share plan. If I wanted to do this through AT&T, one of us would have to get a new number. I don’t want to give up my number since I’ve been using it for about 7.5 years now, and my wife doesn’t want to give up her number because she’s used that one even longer and her family can call her cell from a landline without incurring long distance charges.
I was reading on Hustler $$$ Blog some hustling that is possible with Sprint to get freebies, so there is the possibility that I could convince them to give me free unlimited data (among other things) which would bring my bill down to $30.79 a month, meaning we would only be paying $5.39 more a month than having a share plan. The other difference is that we would each have our own separate pools of 450 minutes each (we’d only get 700 total on a share plan through AT&T) and I’d get to keep my data plan which wouldn’t be included in the share plan price. We don’t normally use that many minutes a month so that isn’t a big deal, but I do like the data plan.
So here’s the question: is keeping my old number, plus the convenience of the extra but seldomly used minutes and the data plan, worth the additional $5.39 a month (or put another way, $64.68 a year)?
