CFA: Pre-paid mobile plans explained

EAST PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) - Love your smartphone, but hate the bill?  You may want to consider signing up for pre-paid wireless.

In the past, pre-paid plans were often associated with people who had bad credit, or the phone selection wasn't as good as with a contract plan, but that's not necessarily the case.

Call 12 for Action went digging, and found even the most popular smartphones are available to prepaid users.

Pre-paid plans may be worth considering if you want to trim how much you're spending on a cell phone plan.

Tiffany Wong has a six children, and found a prepaid plan worked better for her large family.

"If I can get the same service for less than half the money, I'm going for it," said Wong.

Tiffany purchased a prepaid droid, which includes unlimited texting, internet and phone calls for just $40 a month.

That's compared to about $100 a month with her old contract-based carrier bill, which provided the same services.

With the $60 in savings, she was able to purchase her oldest son a pre-paid smartphone as well.

Call 12 for Action found the pre-paid smartphone sales have more than tripled over the past year.

With pre-paid mobile, you don't make any contract commitments to one carrier, and you pay a set flat monthly fee up front.

That comes in handy, eliminating any possibility of expensive overage fees.

At least two cellular providers, Virgin Mobile and Leap-Cricket, are offering pre-paid iPhone service.

T-Mobile tells us, if you currently have an i-Phone, you can ask your carrier to unlock it and then bring it to their store and they'll install a prepaid sim card.