Changing your cell phone plan: Why, and what can go wrong

Timing is everything in comedy, but it's also important when adding or subtracting minutes from your cell phone service plan. If you don't want the joke to be on you, be careful about how and when you make changes to your cell phone plan.

The goal of changing your plan to one that has more minutes is, of course, to avoid overage charges that can run as high as 45 cents per minute when you expect your cell-phone usage to change, either permanently or temporarily—in response to a family crisis, for example. Conversely, if you consistently, or even temporarily, expect to use fewer minutes than your current plan, you may want to switch to a lower-minute plan that costs less per month.

We recommend making such changes as necessary. You can always switch back to your original plan when your calls returns to their old pattern. The major carriers no longer extend the term of your contract if you make such changes.

Stepping up to a higher-minute plan could cost you an additional $20 on your monthly bill at Verizon, for example. But that's cheap for the 700 extra minutes you'd get. If you bought them as overage, at 45 cents per minute, you'd pay a heart-stopping additional $315 on your bill that month.

But switching to a new plan, whether it increases or decreases your total number of minutes, can actually add overage charges to your bill if not done right—in other words, if not done at the optimal time of the month. One Consumer Reports staffer—me—switched from a Verizon 1,400-minute plan to a 2,100-minute plan midway through my 30-day billing cycle. Imagine my surprise when I received a $162 bill for overage minutes.

What went wrong? In short, I hadn't accounted for pro-rating of the included minutes in my plan. I switched about halfway through my 30-day billing cycle. So my original plan's 1,400 minutes were pro-rated to only 768 allowed minutes up to that point in the cycle. Unfortunately, I had already used 1,174 minutes as of the change date, 406 minutes over—even though I'd just signed up for 2,100 minutes and only used 1,770 over the entire month. At 40 cents a minute, those 406 minutes added up to the $162 extra charge.

I complained to customer service, and—another surprise—Verizon adjusted my bill to what it should have been. This consumer-friendly response may explain why Verizon consistently gets high marks on customer service from our long-running surveys of tens of thousands of cell users each year. (Our Ratings of cell phone service providers are available to subscribers.)

All the major carriers say it's possible to inadvertently create overages because of pro-rating for the time in the cycle at which you made a change.

Have you had such cell shocks? How did you deal with them? I'll roll some of your experiences into a followup blog with my own advice on how best to time changes to plans, and what to do if you get stuck with a whopping bill.

—Jeff Blyskal

Comments

[charlie]

Anyone know of a family plan that will allow 6 phones. Looks like they all max at 5. I am with verizon and looking to change if I can find a carrier that will give me a good deal on that last phone. Actually, I would stay with verizon if they would let me add that last phone for 9.99 like the others, but they won't. Can I go over the head of the person I am talking to when I call customer service. I spend about $250. per month with them. It seems they would like to keep my business.

[Paul Rivers]

This whole situation is ridiculous, though - if you up your minutes, they should just do it starting at when your minutes reset and be done with it. Ditto with when you buy a new phone - there's no reason you get "prorated" time and crap. Just change to the beginning of the previous minutes cycle.

Verizon also started charging you for any data your phone uses $2/megabyte. But they won't tell you how you actually got to using the data you used. So he got charged $25 for data for last month, but there's no clue about how that happened. I got charged $10 last month - there's no tracking of where that came from.

It's a bunch of bull!@#!@.

[DonB]

I had no such luck with Verizon. After several recurring problems with my bill, and less than satisfactory customer service, I opted out of my contract. I went with a prepaid phone as I thought my relatively low usage was not worth getting another contract. Much to my surprise I'm actually saving a lot of money each month. All the charges added to the monthly bill made my cell quite expensive. And that's not counting overages, I was always under my allowed minutes anyway.
Now I pay 10c per minute, always & anywhere, with my NET10 phone. I would never have imagined that a prepaid could be cheaper than a contract on the same usage. Why are we signing these contracts?

[Dylan]

Jeff, I would suggest to those who want to avoid the early termination fees of switching plans but still want to lower their cell bills the following: check out the consumer advocacy website http://www.fixmycellbill.com which is powered by a company called Validas where I (admittedly) work. Validas slashes the average cell bill by 22 percent. It costs five bucks to implement our suggested changes to your plan (the average consumer currently saves around $450 annually through us) but we will analyze your bill for free without any commitment of purchase, just to let you know exactly how many dollars your carrier is ripping you off by. I could go on and on about how shifty these cell companies can be in their attempts to make you overpay. We stop them, and have currently put nearly $4.7 million back in the pockets of consumers. You can check out Validas’s fixmycellbill.com in the national news media, most recently on Good Morning America at http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=6887412&page=1.

Good luck to everyone trying to regain control over their wireless bills.

Dylan

[S Carmichael]

I had a similar experience with text messaging on a Cingular/ATT plan. When my daughter started text-messaging in college (4,500 texts in ONE MONTH to her boyfriend) the bill came as thick as a small phonebook with about an extra $600 tacked on! The folks at Cingular were kind enough to redo the bill by forgiving the then .15 per text charge and instead converting it all into a text package for an additional $20 for the month. I was amazed that they'd do that, but was very grateful! Do college kids even TALK on their phones anymore?

[Marie Braden]

My experience with Verizon has been that if you speak to a CSR and are going UP in minutes before the end of the billing cycle, you can ask to have the price plan change backdated to the start of the billing cycle (unless another change was in effect on that date). If you are going DOWN in minutes, however, ask that the change be futuredated to the start of the next billing cycle. This way, you can avoid pro-rations, and the representatives are usually happy to do that, rather than have to deal with you calling back the subsequent month, upset due to overage charges. However, online, I don't think that the option to change the date of your price plan change exists.