Important Information Regarding Prepaid Phones
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Prepaid phone services work similar to a parking meter:
As long as the meter has paid time remaining, your car can stay parked;
similarly, as long as your phone account has funds, you can use the phone.
If the parking meter runs out, your car will get towed and you will have
to pay to retrieve it; similarly, if your phone account runs out of money,
the phone company will cancel the account, and you will need to start over
with a new account, which typically includes a startup fee!
Additionally, you can put all the money you want in a
parking meter to start it, but the meter will run out after a certain
time, regardless of the number of coins you fed it to start. If you
want to stay parked beyond the meter's limit, you have to keep feeding it
as it runs down. Similarly, a prepaid phone account will expire
(typically in 3 months) if you don't put more money in it before it runs
out.
The bottom line is that you need to be sure to keep your prepaid phone
balance current, but don't put more money in it than you plan to use
before the end of the current period.
BoostMobile is a pay-as-you-go carrier with an
exceptionally low priced plan option that works well for many Bookscouts:
Boost charges only 35c per day for unlimited web usage, which works out to
just a little over $10 a month! That's so cheap that many ScoutPal's
have a Boost phone in addition to their day-to-day cell
phone, iPhone, or what-have-you.
When you activate a phone with Boost, a phone number
is assigned and you can certainly use the phone for voice calls
if you wish, but you don't have to. Just don't place or answer any calls,
and your BoostMobile prepaid balance will not be charged for voice minutes.
In this way, you can have a pay-as-you-go scanner phone that only costs you
around $10/mo to operate, and no contract is required. Simply
select or ask for the "web browsing" option when activating a
phone with Boost.
Boost provides a convenient and no-worries way to maintain
your account: login to your Boost account at
boostmobile.com, and set it up with automatic "re-Boosting" from a
credit card whenever the account balance falls below an amount you
specify.
