I have a pay-as-you-go phone plan for my $4.99 cheapo phone. When I load minutes, I check online for coupon codes to enter at check-out. By doing so, I wind up with an extra 40 or 50 minutes of free airtime. It takes about 60 seconds to find a coupon code, and I get enough extra minutes for about 80 brief texts. Since I mostly use my phone for texting my daughters concerning when they'll be home each day, this is like getting a month of free end-of-day texting for my phone. I don't want to be responsible for sending someone to a "bad" site, but if you google your phone plan company + "coupon codes" your search should bring you to a site with listings of active codes, plus some reviews or comments to get an idea of whether or not the codes will work. Sometimes a coupon code is expired or only designed to be use once. When that happens, I simply back-up and try a different code. Within one or two tries I find a working code. Last Thursday I added airtime and used a code for 40 free minutes. My minutes cost me about 7.8 cents each, so I got $3.15 worth of free airtime for 60 seconds of work, or an hourly wage of $189.00. Not too shabby.
By the way, I love my dumb-phone. It does what I need it to do for under $10 per month, and I have a nice pic of my kids as my screen saver every time I turn it on. Everyone else in my household has a smartphone, but I am really okay with not having one. The money that I save by using a non-smartphone goes to things that matter more to me, like travel.
Mini-update -- after mentioning I'd added minutes to my phone to one daughter, she told me that she had wanted to buy me a smartphone as a belated birthday and Christmas present. Very sweet of her, but I declined. I honestly am just fine with my dumb-phone. By the way, I'm not trying to convince anyone else to want what I want. My point is that knowing what we want and what we don't want saves money and simplifies choices.
