The Truth...

Behind cell phone bundling.

When Todd and I got married we both had individual cell phone plans through AT&T. We were happy with our plans and I had never had any problems with AT&T, who had much better customer service than any of the other cell phone providers that I had worked with.

After Todd got laid off, we decided that we had better bundle our phones in order to get a better deal and save money. What a false assumption that was.

First, they have two different ways of billing for customers. Some pay the month previous to usage and some pay after usage. I'm not quite sure why, I think for credit reasons? Anyway, Todd was previous and I was at the end of the month. When we merged, we settled my account and merged to his account because apparently he couldn't merge to my billing cycle, but I could to his. However, when we merged, they changed my billing cycle and so have been trying to double charge me for a month (plus the pro-rated for the change, which is what I was expecting would be the total). PLUS, they charged all total fees and past bills to our new and "improved" (please note my sarcasm) merged plan.

Then Todd got a new underpaying job where he uses his phone a lot more than we realized. So, we are already fighting the huge double phone bill when we realize that NONE of our rollover minutes transferred, not even Todd's. This really sucks because we both had thousands of rollover minutes, none of which we got to use when we received an $800 bill. Yes, $800 in one month. OUCH! That didn't help our already tight situation due to Todd's having to take a huge pay decrease to get a new job.

So, I called the phone company to see what they could do for me. In the past, I have had much better success with them, so hoped they would help me out. As it worked out, they were willing to backdate a new plan, but remember, my bill has already come out and so this doesn't affect my past bill. They are also willing to write off a few hundred dollars worth of minutes. Thank heavens. The wonderful customer service man took pity on me and added almost a thousand rollover minutes. However, that still leaves our bill at about $400, plus the double pay that we are still fighting. Unfortunately, CS Man wasn't wonderful enough to be able to take care of that situation.

So, back to my math for merging cell phones into a family plan?
2 Separate lines with 900 minutes each plus unlimited text = $160 after taxes (plus I have a U of U discount that brings it about $20 lower)

2 Lines on a family plan with only 1400 minutes (current increased minutes plan) and unlimited family text = $160 after taxes (my U of U discount now applies to 2 lines and saves us about $35, however, we had to pay $70 to sign up with AT&T's corporate something or other to get it.)

So, in the end, we will end up saving about $15 (after discount) a month. Of course when you think about all of the extra set-up fees, difference in minutes, loss of rollover minutes and double billing, which comes to about $700 (once again, OUCH!), we will eventually be saving money in about 4 years.