I decided to upgrade my flip phone to a smart phone after many years and went looking for a plan that was cheap, which was the reason I never got a smart phone. There were a few, including some plans for just phone calls and texts, but for a little more I could get a data plan as well. I wound up with a service called Mint SIM. You pay for 3, 6, or 12 months in advance, so it is a prepaid plan, but calls and texts are unlimited and you get 2 GB of data (later bumped to 3 GB). The price can be as low as $15 per month. For $20 a month you can get a plan with 5 GB of data. 2 GB may be tough to meet, but 5 GB should be more than enough. So we’ll see how it goes and I can upgrade at any time.<\/p>\n
Once you sign up, they mail you a SIM card that you put in your phone. They can give you a new phone number or you can port your old number over. Their service runs on the T Mobile network which is actually pretty good in Atlanta, but doesn’t have as much rural coverage as Verizon.<\/p>\n
After 3 years of service (as of 2020) I highly recommend Mint Mobile. If you want to sign up, go to this referral link<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I emailed Jeb to see if it would be okay to leave his plan or if we were under a contract at his Verizon account where my phone number lives. He said we were not under contract, so I ordered 3 months of service (at $15\/month; actually $46 total with fees) which is discounted to get you to try it out. But you can also order a year at a time for the same price. The 3-month price for renewals is $23\/month. 6-month rate is $18. The 1-month renewal is $35! So if Mint SIM works, the best thing is to order a year at a time up front. <\/p>\n Jeb was worried after reading some bad review about people porting their existing phone numbers to Mint SIM. He gave me the Verizon account information I needed to get my phone number ported over. Once I got the card from Mint SIM, I went to their website and entered the information. The only thing I messed up on was the PIN which I entered wrong even though he had actually given that to me, so after a couple of tries, I had ported my phone number and it was effective immediately.<\/p>\n The phone signal seems decent. It looked strong on US 78 out to Athens and at my house the signal seems to be decent, but gets down to maybe 33%. Looking at the phone right now it was at 33% then I picked it up and it was 50% and a few seconds later was maybe 80%, so I think it will work. Sometimes with Verizon I could barely talk on the phone because the signal was so weak.<\/p>\n I’m not crazy about a smartphone compared to a dumb phone for phone calls. Calling while I was driving I had to log in to the phone which isn’t easy to do without taking my attention off the road. The fingerprint reader would have been a good fix for that. Mom was the first person to call me and I missed her call because I didn’t know how to answer the phone. I pressed the blinking phone icon, but you have to slide over to the green phone to answer, which I didn’t know about. At least I didn’t have to log in first. I’m kind of thinking about not doing security at all, but Chrome has all my passwords and would let anyone into my email account. I maybe just need to figure out a better login that I can do while driving. I can make the phone stay unlocked at the house and stay logged in when I am carrying it around, so I will try that and see if it helps.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I decided to upgrade my flip phone to a smart phone after many years and went looking for a plan that was cheap, which was the reason I never got a smart phone. There were a few, including some plans for just phone calls and texts, but for a little more I could get a … Continue reading “Mint Mobile”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3472"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4181,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3472\/revisions\/4181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}