Edit: Now they let you bring your own phone. Also receiving calls has been terrible.
Are you an iPhone user? Well, I may have a good phone plan for you. Previously, I wrote about phone plans that were good deals and I still think those are good choices. However, something new has arisen since then that may be worth looking at if you are an iPhone user. My wife an I are in America for the summer and she was living on wifi until I found the Virgin Mobile USA Inner Circle.
What’s Inner Circle
Virgin Mobile USA has gone to all iPhones and if you join before the end of July you can get a year of service for $1. You have to buy a new phone and port your number, but that is a good deal for an unlimited plan. This could be a great deal because if you pay even a low $30 a month you can save $360 less the cost of the phone. The downside is that after a year it is $50 a month, at which point I will move on to the next deal I find.
Phones
You’ll need to buy a phone from them or the Apple store, but since Virgin Mobile has good deals you might as well buy from them. You can get a new iPhone SE for $280, and iPhone 6 for $320, all the way up to $970 for iPhone 7 Plus 256GB. This is a much better deal that Freedompop which charges $390 for a refurbished iPhone 6. Plus you can get the phone unlocked. It is unclear exactly when, after 14 days or after 12 months, but either way you will have a very low bill.
Conclusion
Switching phones can be a bit of a pain, but think of an amount of money that you would do it for. If you could save $200 to go through the pain would you? For us that was an easy calculation, rather than $30 a month with the T-mobile Walmart plan, we bought an iPhone 6 32GB and sold our iPhone 6 16GB. The savings were $360 (plan fee) – $320 (new phone) – $1 (new plan) + $190 (sold old phone) = $219, but most people will probably save even more. Finally, it was good to do because now we are down to three phones.