Verizon: we're gonna make you a deal you can't refuse

I'm pretty sure the grandkids of Milo Minderbinder now work at Verizon. They send me a text that essentially said $700 credit for trading in my iPhone 8, which I bought in 2017, and renewing the contract if I act right away.

I'm skeptical but yesterday we're at Tractor Supply in Lafayette and the Verizon store is blocks away so what the hell. My wife and I go in, fully expecting that we're going to get a bait-and-switch. Dude pulls up our account and says yep, it's legit. And if you renew your contract, your monthly rate will go DOWN by $30/month.

So you're going to give me $700 for an old cell phone that might be worth $250 on the used market and then cut another $720 off our contract over the next 2 years? There had to be a Catch-22 but we couldn't find it.

Now have an iPhone 12 Pro in hand (cost me $300) and wife has a 12 Pro Max on order (no trade in deal but it's what she wants). FWIW she was a Samsung S7 girl but it was crapping out and no longer supported. She decided the new Samsungs are lame so switching OS is a big deal.

What's your monthly bill? I have a hard time beating $47 a month for Xfinity (VZW towers) and $400 for a mid level Samsung phone.

I do under $30/month per phone for total wireless (also verizon towers) and BYOP. Which I just get refurbs off Amazon. I think that's with something like a 15GB data cap. So I'm curious about the monthly bill too. About the only minor annoyance is any crap service that requires sms messaging to enroll (and uses email to text as a backend) won't work with the small guys. Outside of that I've never seen the big guys be competitive with some of their subs.

Thanks. I am going to look into total wireless.
I have boost and it is no longer owned by Sprint after m&a.

I was thinking about cricket as well.

It’s all about getting you to sign a 2 year contract. Usually with a nice phone payoff fee if you break the contract.

you might check mint mobile as well. We have been using them the last year been paying $15 a month per phone.

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Originally Posted by Mtneer

I'm pretty sure the grandkids of Milo Minderbinder now work at Verizon. They send me a text that essentially said $700 credit for trading in my iPhone 8, which I bought in 2017, and renewing the contract if I act right away.

I'm skeptical but yesterday we're at Tractor Supply in Lafayette and the Verizon store is blocks away so what the hell. My wife and I go in, fully expecting that we're going to get a bait-and-switch. Dude pulls up our account and says yep, it's legit. And if you renew your contract, your monthly rate will go DOWN by $30/month.

So you're going to give me $700 for an old cell phone that might be worth $250 on the used market and then cut another $720 off our contract over the next 2 years? There had to be a Catch-22 but we couldn't find it.

Now have an iPhone 12 Pro in hand (cost me $300) and wife has a 12 Pro Max on order (no trade in deal but it's what she wants). FWIW she was a Samsung S7 girl but it was crapping out and no longer supported. She decided the new Samsungs are lame so switching OS is a big deal.

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the catch 22 is you signed a contract.

I have 2 phones. My primary phone with unlimited data is on AT&T. My spare phone is on Ting. The spare costs me about $7/mo since it's really just for emergency or privacy (it has the phone number I provide to travel companies and overseas trips and is kept on airplane mode with wifi most of the time). Since I also use DirecTV, the AT&T account gives me free access to HBO (which I don't use much) and HBOMax (which I am using sporadically). I expect it will get even more use if Crunchyroll is rolled into HBOMax as some media observers are predicting.

I used to enjoy the free use of AT&T wifi hotspots when I was traveling but I honestly haven't seen any of those in ages. Then again, I tend to turn wifi off when I'm away from home because I don't want my phone trying to bounce between wifi and 4G or to latch onto hotspots set up to sniff out your info. If I was trying to optimize my budget, I expect I could drop DirecTV, shift to a single phone on Ting (or even both phones on Ting), and subscribe to one or more streaming services and still save somewhere in the neighborhood of $70-100 per month. I haven't done this because I still enjoy DirecTV's variety of options and occasionally watching a movie on HBO or HBOMax and there was convenience (particularly when I was traveling a lot) in knowing I had unlimited bandwidth available via my phone.

The catch might be is that the $700 is a bill credit applied over 24 months, and if you pay that phone off early you have to pay full price.

I used to think those types of deals were good too. After a year of $12 per month TOTAL for two lines on Xfinity Mobile (Verizon network, as stated already) I laugh at such offers. The same usage even off-contract cost us nearly $80/mo. The difference is $68/mo so at 2 years to get the "deal" would cost me $1,632 extra just for service. Even I can do that math.