how can I keep my cell phone number cheaply while spending time abroad?
The Mr. and I went through this not too long ago. We solved the problem of keeping our numbers by switching to pre-paid (no contract) plans. The trick to keeping it cheap is to buy the largest denomination of minutes you can find at the deepest discount you can find. Then as long as you don’t talk more than 300 min./month, it’s cheaper than even the cheapest monthly plan out there. T-Mobile is the one we went with, and I believe it’s still the cheapest. It’s 10 cents a minute for domestic calls, with 0$/mo as long as you buy your minutes $100 (1000 min) at a time. You can sometimes find them online for $95, making it $9.5 cents a minute. The T-Mobile minutes last for a year when you buy them in bulk like that, even if you don’t actively use the phone. So if you’re gone for more than a year you may need to buy more minutes to keep the account active. (I don’t work for T-mobile, or get kick-backs of any kind from them.
I’m on t-mobile too and I’ve also been investigating this problem. A couple things I learned: 1) For t-mobile prepaid, if you buy $100 of prepaid minutes off the bat the minutes won’t expire for a year. So that could be about $8 a month if you don’t go over the minutes. 2) A downside of prepaid is you get charged for every text message, which could be problematic if you’re using text messaging to save money on international long distance fees. 3) I thought about going t-mobile prepaid and switching the voicemail number to an online voicemail/email notification service so I wouldn’t have to dial in to get messages. Unfortunately t-mobile prepaid does not allow you to change the “conditional line forwarding number” to anything but the t-mobile voicemail number, unlike t-mobile postpaid.
I have a Virgin Mobile pre-pay phone that I bought in the US and which I use only in the US. It cost me $19.99, the Kyocera Marbl. I use PayPal to top up my phone with $20 every 90 days to keep the number alive. You can select options on the Virgin website so it does this automatically for you. They also email you to let you know when the 90 day top-up is due, and when it’s been done. If you can port your number to Virgin, I’d suggest this as a good option.
