Year Two Recap for Two, Ages 55 and Up
After being with T-Mobile for over eight years, I switched to Tello two years ago because they didn’t honor their price lock, which was important to me.
Here’s the summary: over the past year, I paid a total of $252.51 for two lines—that’s $21.04 per month, or just $10.52 per line. My line uses about 3.47 GB of data and 144 minutes monthly; my wife averages 4.84 GB and 71 minutes a month. Since we have home internet, we’re usually on Wi-Fi at home, and when we’re out, we look for guest networks at places like bars or restaurants. There are so many free Wi-Fi spots that we barely need to use cellular data. Many people still think they need unlimited data, but with a little effort, it’s often unnecessary.
We use Tello’s monthly rollover, so each line has over 30 GB of data stored, along with plenty of unused minutes. I set a Google Calendar reminder every 29 days and a Quicken bill alert to make sure I never miss a manual renewal. Although we technically used 348 days of service on our 12 “monthly” plans, I adjusted the average cost to cover a full year—resulting in $252.61 for 365 days.
For international travel, we rely on Roamless, which lets us use a non-expiring bucket of data worldwide. With Wi-Fi calling enabled my phone works everywhere we need. We’re still working through the $40 we loaded over a year ago, and likely won’t need more for years. So, international coverage is sorted.
Even paying for our own Netflix subscription ($8.55/month, soon $9.62), our total is just $30 per month for two mobile lines, Netflix, and international roaming. That's approximately $600 annual savings versus my T-Mobile Magenta 55+ plan on the same network.
Tello really can’t be beat!