How to Reduce Cell Phone Bill and Avoid Monthly Over-Limit Charges:

Most adults have at least one smart device with a data plan these days. Add in other family members, and you’ve got even more devices. And as the number of devices multiplies, your monthly cell phone bill can quickly skyrocket out of control. That’s why I want to share my family’s top tips how to save money on your phone bill.

True confession: until we learned about #2 and #3, my husband and I could not afford the monthly expense of smartphones in our budgets! As such, we were relatively late adopters. But (as of 2019, when I first published this post) we now use all three of these hacks to keep our monthly bill for our two smartphones between $50-$80 per month, total. And as of this post’s 2026 update, we’re STILL paying under $80/month for our two smartphones, and under $100/month for our total family cell phone bill!

Can you say the same for YOUR family’s mobile plan?

Honestly, these tricks are some of our favorite ways to save money on cell phone bills, month after month. Want to learn our secrets? Then read on!

Originally published Apr. 29, 2019; last updated August 2026.

How To Save Money On Your Phone Bill in Three Easy Steps:

1. Sign (and get your friends to sign!) the Wait Until 8th Pledge

Have you heard about the Wait Until 8th pledge? Our family has committed to it, and I spread the word whenever I can. It’s a commitment to let our kids be kids for as long as possible, by agreeing NOT to give them their own smartphones until 8th grade.

We think this commitment makes a lot of sense. Thanks to various grants, our economically diverse school district now provides every student with a school iPad for schoolwork, so our kids and their friends don’t “need” a smartphone to do homework or research. And moreover, as schools increasingly realize the downsides of cell phones in students’ hands during the school day, more and more districts – and even entire states – are banning student possession of cell phones during the school day.

While we have the option to let the girls keep their school-owned devices over the summer, we have so far chosen not to. Our girls already show enough signs of addictive behavior if we let them spend too much free time on their school iPads, That’s why we think it’s important to preserve their childhood for them, by removing that temptation over the summer.

Why should your family consider this?

Well, for starters, researchers have established links between heavy social media use and higher rates of depression among young people, That’s enough reason for me to think long and hard before giving my kids an expensive “smart” device any earlier than necessary.

It’s also one of the reasons that as of July 2026, 3 out of every 5 states bans student cell phone use during the school day, partly with the hope of improving declining test scores and increasing school absenteeism.

But this commitment to hold off on smartphones until 8th grade works best if you get other parents to sign onto it with you. So reach out to your neighbors, your friends, and your kids’ friends’ parents, and urge their families to commit alongside yours. If your kids’ friends don’t have smartphones, either, your kids will spend a lot less time begging you for one!

Need more convincing?

Having access to a phone at early ages give kids unnecessary excess exposure to cyberbullying.
More screen time correlates with lower grades and worse sleep.
Plus, kids under the age of 10 are especially susceptible to becoming addicted to those little devices and the distractions they provide.

No wonder many leading tech executives don’t allow their own kids to have smartphones until they’re 14!

And when your family eventually decides the time is right, choosing certified pre-owned iPhones like those from Plug can be a cost-effective way to provide a reliable device without paying full price for a brand-new model. There’s even a ton of resources on the Wait Until 8th website to help you get the word out.

Even if you don’t sign the pledge, consider putting off adding a child to your cell plan for a few years. You do the math. I’m betting for each child you put off till 8th grade, you can save at least a hundred dollars per year, if not more. And even if the grownups in your household have legit reasons for plans with (say) unlimited data and texts, that doesn’t mean you can’t have a separate plan for your kids that keeps them on a much tighter leash (more on this below).

2. Switch providers

(2019 recommendation – skip down for my updated recommendations) When Dear Husband and I decided in 2014 that we could no longer avoid smartphones, we did a lot of research among friends to see what carriers they used, how happy they were with the service, and how much they paid per month. We were unhappy with both the cost and the poor customer service for our then-service provider for our two flip phones.

And we also knew we couldn’t afford smartphones unless we found something less expensive. We’d done the research. We knew that if we stayed with our then-provider when ditching our flip phones for smartphones with data plans, our monthly cell phone bill would double (from about $80 to about $160).

Since we were both beyond our two-year commitments with our then-provider, DH and I knew we could switch providers at any time. But when one of DH’s grad school friends told him about Ting, we were skeptical. Frankly, it all sounded too good to be true:

No contracts; you can join, quit, add, or drop devices any time you want.
No fixed plans; you pay only for what you use each month, so each bill reflects actual usage, and adjusts monthly to match that month’s usage patterns.
MUCH lower rates than any other provider, for a network built on several of the leading nationwide providers.
Straightforward, super-affordable overseas per-minute/per-megabyte charges whenever you travel out of the country.

Minds. Blown.

And even better, a few years (2022) after we joined them, they made calling to a bunch of other countries included as part of their regular monthly minutes! That means I can call my dear friend Raiah in Canada all I want, without incurring extra fees for calls to non-US numbers!

And (though we were going to upgrade to smartphones anyway), we learned we could keep our existing phone numbers AND our existing devices, if we wanted. Amazing.

So how do Ting’s bills work?

When we first started using Ting in 2019, they had a super-reasonable pay-as-you-go system, with realtime online tracking of your minutes/texts/data used, and the option to set up alerts if you were getting close to limits you didn’t want to exceed. If you DID exceed those amounts, no biggie; they just moved that part of your plan into the next largest “bucket” for that month. Our cell phone bills when we used Ting, depending on our monthly usage, varied between $50-$80 most months, total, for our two smartphones.

Since we switched away from Ting, they’ve put more effort into expanding their home internet options. They currently offer two options for cell packages: either $10/month as a bundle with their home internet service (check here to see if this is an option where you live), or an unlimited $25/month plan per smartphone without their home internet package.

What about customer service?

Although the hundreds (if not thousands!) of dollars we saved after switching to Ting was our favorite part, their excellent customer service was a close second:

Getting our new phones activated when we switched over (and again when we upgraded iPhones several years later) was way easier than I expected.
Their tech support folks were always super-helpful, and super-easy to get ahold of (no long waits on hold, or navigating endless phone trees!).
And on the rare occasions when we had a question or needed help with something (e.g., ordering a new SIM card when I had to replace my phone following a sad encounter with the Atlantic Ocean), they were just as accessible.

2026 updated recommendations:

Our current cell phone plan:

Dear Husband and I actually switched away from Ting a year or two ago now, after concluding that they were never going to upgrade their networks to allow for the newer iPhone models that only take eSIMS. We were both waiting for this change before upgrading our iPhones, but when an overseas trip was on the horizon and we were anticipating buying international eSIMS for that trip, we decided the time to switch had come.

We researched several providers at the time, and ultimately decided that the right plan for us was with Consumer Cellular. Since Dear Husband is over 50, he originally signed us up for their “senior” bundle of two lines with unlimited calls/texts/data. But we soon realized that we needed way less data than “unlimited,” so we are now on two lines a month for a total of $78 ($60 plus taxes/fees), with unlimited calls/texts and a shared 20GB of data. (For up to 10GB shared data, we’d pay $47.50/month before taxes/fees; if we wanted only 5GB, we’d pay just $38/month plus fees and taxes.)

My mama’s new cell phone plan:

I was just checking in with DH earlier today, because I’m visiting my own Mama right now and helping her get away from her $128+/month cell bills for her ONE smartphone. As he put it when I asked him about his experiences so far as our Consumer Cellular primary account holder, “Their customer service has been good. You talk to real people. And they’re good with people who need tech talk to be simplified.” (When I bought a new phone after he did, I also had a great experience talking to their actual human beings and getting my new phone set up on their network.)

As for my mama, she’s in the process of switching to USMobile, which will also include her home internet. Her current ISP just upped its prices to $90/month – meaning, between her cell and her landline (which she still likes to have) and her internet, she’s currently paying just shy of $250/month! As we calculated earlier today, she can get all three services from USMobile for $82/month, which is one-third of what she’s currently paying.

And what about our kids?

I’m happy to report that not only did our kids make it until 8th grade until getting phones, we made it way past that. Cell phones are banned in our district’s middle school, so Kimmie only got her first phone – a $30 flip phone on the Tracfone network – at the start of 10th grade, after EARNING it through demonstrating responsible behavior.

Kimmie only upgraded to a smartphone (an iPhone, which she purchased used and paid for herself out of allowance savings) at the start of 11th grade. It was only then that rising-9th-grader Essie inherited Kimmie’s old flip phone (Essie’s first cell phone), which she uses to this day.

When Kimmie first started using her flip phone, we had her on a plan that limited how many texts and minutes she had each month. She blew through her first month of texts in about 36 hours, thanks to a massive group text a friend added her to, and learned a valuable lesson; she now uses other means to message friends, such as Instagram, Pinterest (how she messages Essie), or WhatsApp. We also keep her on a limited data plan (usually about 1GB/month), to encourage her to think carefully about being glued to her phone 24/7 especially when not on WiFi.

And no, Essie’s flip phone is not as “cool” as her friends’ smartphones, but she’s surviving – and saving up for her first iPhone. (As well as working on keeping her late-night YouTube scrolling under control, since staying up half the night scrolling mindlessly is a behavior we insist she curb BEFORE she upgrades to a smartphone.) In the meantime, both kids are still on the Tracfone network.

The bottom line for our monthly bills as of 2026:

For Kimmie’s 1GB data plus unlimited texts/calling, we pay $15/month with Tracfone; when she runs over on data, she has to pay an extra $10/GB out of her allowance to top off her data. Essie’s current flip-phone plan runs about $20 for 90 days, with 60 texts, 60 minutes of calls, and 60MB of data; again, adding on an additional GB of data is a $10 top-off from her allowance.

This means that for our family of four (three of whom use iPhones that we purchased used to save money), in 2026 we’re still paying about $100/month for our four cell phones.

Oh, yeah – did you catch that part about the fact that we got our iPhones used? That gets to the third of my family cell phone money-saving tips:

3. Consider alternatives to buying new

The one “downside” to the less-standard cell phone providers I’ve mentioned so far throughout this post – if you’re used to more conventional phone providers – is that they don’t give you “free” phones every two years. (Read: they don’t pad their phone bills so that you pay off that “free” phone over the two years you’re locked into a contract.)

I kid you not, when I was reviewing my own Mama’s nearly-$130/month cell bill earlier today, I was like “what’s this extra $33/month iPad charge? You don’t need a data plan for your iPad! – you barely use it when you don’t have wifi access!” And she replied, “Oh, I think that’s the insurance in case it gets lost or stolen,” to which I replied, “And when security took it at the airport a few years ago/you never got it back, did they replace it for you?” and she was like “well, no, they only gave me a little bit of money for it.”

“I think maybe I’m still paying it off?” she added after a few minutes. “No, wait, didn’t you buy it new from the Apple store?” “Oh, wait, maybe I did…”

Either way, there is no way she should be paying that extra $33/month to her current cell provider. This is why you can bring your existing device(s) with you to all of the alternative cell phone providers I mentioned above, as long as they’re compatible with the providers’ networks. Unlocked phones are usually best for this, and you’ll need to buy a new SIM or e-SIM for $10-$20, but that’s a small price to pay compared to an overpriced new phone.

Which gets us from just saving on your phone plan, to saving on the phone itself.

Cheap Cell Phones AND Cell Phone Plans

But what if you don’t have an existing device? (Or you’re ready to upgrade to a new one anyway?)

This is where the resale market comes in. The only time many “smart” devices go on sale is right before a new model comes out. On the other hand, there are tons of places you can look to buy like-new, refurbished, and otherwise “gently used” devices online, including

Gazelle;
GizmoGrind;
BuyBackWorld;
ItsWorthMore;
Swappa,
and, of course, Ebay and (providing you know where to look) Amazon.

Why consider gently-used over new?

Because it’s a great way to save money:

We’ve purchased several barely-year-old iPhones used at half the brand-new cost. Ditto the practically-brand-new six-month-old iPad I got for half the new price.
Buying gently-used tech helps to curb global emissions and the resources needed for manufacturing new items.
Giving used tech a new lease on life also helps curb electronic waste. Electronics like cell phones, tablets, and laptops are full of toxic substances that require special treatment in the disposal process.

Short-term vs. long-term savings:

True, having to buy your own phone costs more upfront. But in the long run, you’re better off – especially if you forgo the latest shiny thing for a slightly-used device with plenty of life left in it. The various resale sites I’ve linked to above all sell a wide range of devices, including tablets/e-readers, and even laptops.

In our case, a smartphone plan with our previous provider (including two “free” phones) would have cost us about $80 more per month ($40 per device), while locking us into another two-year contract. But for what we paid for our “like new” iPhones from (about $800 total for our first smartphones), our phones were basically “paid off” in less than a year. If we’d gone with our initial provider and “free” phones vs. Ting and gently-used iPhones, we would have paid more than twice as much over the course of a two-year contract!

How does it work?

Given our interest in NOT spending a lot of money when we first upgraded to smartphones in 2015, Dear Husband and I were excited to check out the used-device marketplace. We had already researched which model iPhone we wanted. And after checking back periodically on the resale sites we were watching, we were each able to snag the model we wanted, in the color we wanted, barely a year old, in like-new condition. For about HALF what we would have paid for brand-new phones.

Want to save on cell phone bills? Follow these three easy tips, and see how much you'll slash from your current cell phone budget! — This is some of what was available on one tech reseller for recent-model iPhones, a few hours before I first published this post in 2019.

When we upgraded to newer models a few years later, we did the same thing – and saved just as much. The same was true when I bought my first iPad. That took a little longer, because of the color combination and features I wanted in what was then the latest model. But about 6 months after that model came out, I saved 1/3 off the retail price by buying a like-new one from a resale site.

And as for the guarantee: When hubby’s phone came without one of the chargers the seller had listed as included, he called the reseller and complained. They quickly refunded him part of his purchase price – enough to buy a brand-new charger.

Your turn:

What tricks has your family tried to save on cell phone bills? Have you used any of the tips I’ve mentioned here? Do you have others I’ve omitted? Let us know in the comments!

If you enjoyed this post’s cell phone money saving tips, why not share them with others by pinning this image?

NOTE: This site contains affiliate links. I may earn a small commission from any purchases made through affiliate links, at no additional cost to you. For more information, please read the full disclosure/privacy policy.