I dropped the landline last December. I don’t make many calls and even fewer long distance calls. The costs continued to rise and was at $25 per month.
To call my brother 6 miles away was long distance. By the time the phone company tacked on all their fees and long distance charges, even a 1-minute call outside my area was around $5.00.
I went with a pre-paid cellular with 600 minutes and 1 years of service for $100 (around $9 per month). I also bought a MagicJack ($20 for the instrument and $20 for a year of service).
The combined cellular and MagicJack with free long distance was still less per month than what the landline was. And, I can take the celluar with me.
Thanks for sharing what you did.
We’re going to switch the cells to prepaid. My wife’s cell is something like $35/month and she never even turns it on. I’m on the lowest minute plan (an unadvertised level below what’s on the web site) and I still don’t use half of it.
Walmart/Tracfone have a $30 flip phone and a nice family plan. I can by a year’s worth of minutes for both of us, and the phones, for what we pay for 3 months’ service.
I looked at our long distance on the land line. There are fixed costs of something like $8/month. We only made one call last month that qualified (my parents - wife’s parents are “local long distance”), for something like 30 cents. So that one call cost us $8.30! We could have used one of the cell phones for essentially free.
I think the landline is somewhat of a psychological thing - its a “real” phone to me compared to the wireless. If it were affordable, I could allow myself the luxury of thinking that way, and for the convenience. It’s now priced beyond that level.