<p>DH went through our phone bill since it seemed higher than normal. We discovered that:<br>
A. younger son went $25 over on text messaging. He is now on an unlimited plan. Since we have a family phone plan, it was the same price to put unlimited texting onto all of our phones, rather than 2 phones (we only bought unlimited texting for our older son prior to this). I don’t text much, but everyone else text messages a fair amount now.</p>
<p>B. We were billed for 3 downloads on our older son’s phone. We asked DS if he ordered these. Believe me, if he did, he was to pay for that. The bill for that was about $35. Turns out that he never ordered them. The phone company was able to see that our son never used these games, so they were able to take it off of our bill. Watch your bills carefully. </p>
<p>More about this: Phone company claims that S must have received a text message for a free game trial, and it was not free. My son says that he would never have said yes to such a message.</p>
<p>I read today in Family Circle that the average teenager uses 922 texts per month. Since we got unlimited family texting, D is using about 4000/month (during the summer, it will be lower during school - maybe 2500/month). </p>
<p>Yes, watch the cell phone bill carefully! I use it to check who D is sending/receiving all those texts to/from, and at what times. At one point when I saw midnight texts on a school night, we required the phone to be turned off and left with us at bedtime.</p>
<p>We had a monthly charge once for some monthly ringtone that she didn’t order. The phone companies don’t check with you before putting these things on your bill. They expect you to tell them if it is bogus.</p>
<p>I don’t go through the cell phone bills with a fine tooth comb as a normal rule, but if the amount of the bill isn’t within a few dollars of what I think it should be, I do take a deeper look at the bill.</p>
<p>Our previous carrier billed us for a text message while my D was in class in high school. My D NEVER texted during school (S is another story…). I called the phone company & they told me, “Kids do it all the time - you can’t necessarily believe your kid.” I was pretty peeved … kids might do it, but not my D (not a rule breaker & school was very strict about no phones in class). I paid it (10 cents), and it never happened again. I honestly believe that my complaint kept us from not being billed for something we shouldn’t have been billed for … we were placed on the “can’t be fooled” list! :)</p>
<p>We have six lines…I have to call about once every three months with some problem. For instance, I took all texting off work phones yet they did not remove the service. I was billed for employees texting and they took it off.
Our cel bill is about 50 pages and I read every one every month.
Definitely have to check the bills…</p>
<p>LOL collegemom16-
My kids (boys) hate actually <em>talking</em> to anyone on the phone- they would much prefer to text and can do it without looking at the keyboaard (though s#1 now has an iphone-- I guess he can’t do that without looking now). The cancer/brain tumor scare would merely be an excuse used by my kids to avoid talking to us on the phone!</p>
<p>My 14 year old niece had over 11,000 texts one month. My brother’s family cell phone bill (with the itemized list of “calls”) came in a box rather than an envelope. Yes, they do have unlimited texting. Niece’s little sister says all of the text messages were between big sister A and her best friend M and said something like this:
A: what are you doing?
M: nothing much. What are you doing?
A: nothing.
(wait 15 minutes)
M: what’s up?
A: nothing much. What’s up with you?
M: nothing
etc until 11,000+ messages or until next month starts
:)</p>
<p>Midwestmom2kids, that sounds like such in depth meaningful conversation, LOL.</p>
<p>I am still peeved that a phone company can just add $35 to a bill for downloads that were never ordered. They did say that our son never played any of these games. My son showed my H his phone to show him that none of those games were downloaded. It is so easy to trip up people for that small amount of money. I wonder how this scam happened.</p>
<p>The latest intro is talking text messages. All these companies are much easier to deal with and stop the fake charges when you don’t have the service contract.</p>
<p>A law was passed in California this week outlawing the fee charged if you cancel early. On my phone it was $200.</p>
<p>Expect the companies to make up that lost fee somewhere else.</p>
