<p>My elderly parents aren’t interested in a cell phone, but I feel like they need one for emergencies. Case in point – this week, a storm went through and left them without phone and TV service. After a day, they drove to a 7-Eleven to use a pay phone to call my in-town siblings for help. They could have used this extra phone to call the utility company. Additionally, my 83yo dad often makes really long drives, hundreds of miles in the middle of nowhere, and I would love for him to have a phone in case he gets into trouble. My mom doesn’t want him to have one because she doesn’t want people calling him, dristracting him while he’s driving. But it seems like a pay-as-you-go phone used only for emergencies contingent on not giving the number to anyone would work.</p>
<p>Other ideas? Am I even using the right terminology – pay-as-you-go phone? Is there a cost beyond the initial investment of buying the phone?</p>
<p>The problem with pay-as-you go phones, known mostly as prepaid plans, is that you buy cards with minutes on them, but once you activate the card, you have a limited amount of time to use them. My suggestion would be to put them on your family plan. In most cases, that’s $10/month, sharing from your pool of minutes, which they aren’t going to use much of, it seems.</p>
<p>Sounds like they want an “emergency phone” but frankly to the elderly, knowledge of this complex plan, minutes, and expiration thereof may not be a good fit. I’d suggest putting them on your family plan which is far simpler. They could kick in their share of the money if you wanted them to.</p>
<p>I currently have a t-mobile phone which we have had for years. It is called a pre-paid or pay-as-you-go phone. We bought the phone & activated it & paid $100 for a phone card that gave him 1000 minutes that last a year. At the end of the year, if he still has minutes, we buy a $10 card with more minutes–it rolls over the minutes he had remaining for another year, plus the 40 minutes he bought with the $10 card.</p>
<p>He rarely uses the phone. If he used it more, we would investigate other plans. Another tmobile plan is $30/month. It allows me up to 1500 minutes of talking and/or texts. I love it & use it regularly. I am not sure what will happen when the merger of Tmobile & AT&T is complete–these plans may go away, but are still available for now.</p>
<p>There are many other plans as well. Try to use a carrier that has good reception where they live and are likely to need service. Verizon has better reception than most carriers, in our experience. One of the pre-paid plans uses that network–Boost or Virgin, I think, but am not sure.</p>
<p>Be sure they get a car charger, especially for the long-distance driver, but would not help him where there is no reception anyway. A problem with many who rarely use phones is not charging & keeping the phones charged.</p>
<p>HImom, that sounds like what we need – a phone with limited strings. I like the rollover minutes thing because the idea is that they would almost never use it, but it would be there if needed. Although you’re correct that there might be a problem with reception where my dad is driving (toward the Texas panhandle).</p>
<p>We are on AT&T and just got ds2 a new phone for his birthday, so we have an extra phone ready for use along with a charger. I’ll get my dh to research available options.</p>
<p>Actually, my dad is quite open to new technology. He wanted a computer; mom said no. He wanted a cell phone; mom said no. In retrospect, I’m glad we didn’t push the computer because who knows how many Nigerian princes they would have helped by now. ;)</p>
<p>We bought a Virgin Mobile phone for my son, who really didn’t need a phone other than a few times a month. Several phone models are available, and it’s easy to “top up” the phone online to add minutes using a credit card or Paypal. Prepaid cards with a scratch-off number can also be purchased at many stores and can be entered right on the phone. It was pretty cheap, as I recall - $20 lasted about three months. I bought the phone at Best Buy, along with a top up card.</p>
<p>AT&T has a family plan with up 6 lines (I think) sharing minutes. The number of minutes depends on the plan, and unused ones roll over. With all the fees an extra line is ~$14/month.</p>
<p>youdontsay, my elderly grandparents have pre-paid phones from Virgin Mobile. They really liked their selection of phones… My mom just got them new phones for Christmas and they love them because the buttons are much bigger then their old phones. They have to “top them up” every 3 months and the smallest card that I have seen them use is 20 dollars. You can buy them pretty much anywhere, you just dial the number on the back of them (or do it online) and they add the minutes to your phone for you. It’s pretty easy. You might be able to buy a bigger card and have it last more then 90 days… not sure how that works. Any unused minutes carry over into the next 90 day period. My grandfather has a ton of minutes on his phone and my grandmother uses all of hers every 90 days. She said one of these days she’s going to accidently use his phone to call one of her friends, lol.</p>
<p>We used to have several Tracphones in the family. They worked out pretty well until we became more frequent users. But I did not think my Dad would be able to add minutes easily (it’s done via computer or touchtone phone), so he got Verizon </p>
<p>If you have an extra slot on your family plan, it works well to add a grandparent for about $10/month.</p>
<p>If you are not ectremely picky about the phone I would seggest you look into Page plus. That is what D is on and has never had a problem. They use the complete Verizon network, hence excellent coverage and you have a choice of plans. the cheapest one is $10 and good for 120 days, calls are $0.10 per minute, or $80 good for 365 days and calls are $0.04 per minute. All of the unused minutes roll over. If you are interested in this PM me and I will send you the link to the dealer and they will easily sell you a phone (reasonable cost) and do auto top ups for you so they would never run out. My daughters plan is unlimited Talk and text and 20 meg of data for $44.95 a month and swears by it. It works here in Canada with no problems except voice calls are roaming but not for text</p>
<p>There is a lot of good info here. There are two points I would emphasize/add. First, remembering to keep the phone charged is important. It won’t work if it has been allowed to go dead. So “maintaining” it is important. </p>
<p>The other is that not all cell phones work inside the house. It would be good to check to make sure it works inside the house before the period for returns expires. Also nor are they totally reliable in the hinterlands, as there are “white spots” without service because cell towers are too far away.</p>
<p>We have four pay-as-you go phones. We pay $100/year for all four or about $8.33 per phone per month. This has met our needs well. It sounds like the Page Plus plan is a little cheaper in how much you need to keep the phone running and in the cost of minutes. The cost of minutes doesn’t matter much to us as we don’t use our phones that much.</p>
<p>You could buy the phone on your own name and give it to him and then you just maintain the account - add minutes onto his plan via the website when it is needed - you could set up an automated calendar reminder.</p>
<p>There are emergency plans where you use your credit card to make calls but he would have to enter credit card information for each call which could be a real nuisance.</p>
<p>Most of our phones can be charged off of our computers as recent phones typically use a Micro-USB port for syncing and charging. It’s a lot more convenient to have cheap USB cables than it is to have to pay for chargers which don’t work with different phone models.</p>
<p>I would like more info about the Page plus phones. That may be a phone we decide to get, as we like the Verizon system but don’t use many minutes talking and are tired of paying $100/month and more for the privilege of having 3 cell phones. We aren’t very picky about our phones.</p>
<p>I love the plans where you can buy minutes that last a year and only have to top up annually. My current plan for this is Tmobile, but am thinking of switching to Page Plus, since it uses the Verizon network, that works better for our family than the Tmobile network. For some reason, the latter didn’t work for any of the apartments S lived in the other summer and won’t work for the apartment D will live in this coming year. My Verizon plan will soon expire and I plan to switch. Am tired of these huge $100+/month bills when we call so rarely.</p>
<p>I think that all of the phones allow you to do the annual top-off thing. I’m sure that there is a very healthy market for those that don’t have the cash flow to pay multiple months in advance though.</p>
<p>It does indeed take research to figure out which programs allow the minutes to last an entire year and only require an annual “topping off.” I’m glad that Tmobile currently has such a program, but am unsure what AT&T will do to the Tmobile plans, which are considerably cheaper than their plans after the merger is finalized.</p>
<p>It may cause some migration to other carriers if all the less expensive plans are scrapped and folks have to select the AT&T plans or nothing.</p>
She said one of these days she’s going to accidently use his phone to call one of her friends, lol.</p>