Pay as you go phone plans

[amkaylor]

I have an AT&T Pay As You Go plan, and I use it for many of the reasons you want to use it, Bree. We have Vonage at home, so we use that, as it's only $15 a month and I get everything with it free. But when we travel, we need a way to make calls. I just have our home phone forward to our GoPhone (it's free with Vonage to forward calls), so that way, people aren't always calling our cell phone, they can just call our house.
I love my AT&T Plan. I travel for five days out of each month. I loaded it with $50 to start, and the minutes last for 90 days. There is one thing to note, however. With AT&T, you can choose a couple of options. One of them is a higher cost per minute, but there is no access fee. The other is a lower cost per minute that they deduct from the value, but you pay a $1.00 fee per day of use. In our case, the fee is worth it. If we use the phone, we pay $1.00 from it, but then after that, all the minutes are at the lower cost. So if you used it 10 minutes or more, the $1.00 saves you money.
I am in a fairly rural area and get coverage in most places. I've always had good customer service, as well..

We wanted to go with Vonage also. No can do. Verizon (FairPoint) won't sell them our exchange. Too many long-time guests have the phone number in their books for me to change that horse in midstream.
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That's too bad. Vonage has been wonderful for us, and I've heard of Verizon (that's our local landline company where we live, as well) has been difficult about transferring numbers. I believe that Verizon actually sued Vonage over the technology about a year or so ago, so maybe that has something to do with it.
My father swears by MagicJack, which is similar, but you only pay $20 a year, regardless. The only downside is that the computer needs to always be on for it to work.