How to Avoid Cell Phone Overage Charges

If you’re like most people who own a cell phone, chances are at somepoint you’ve been hit with expensive overage charges for using more minutes than were included in your plan. You probably had no idea why you were hit with overage charges one month and not the next. While cell phone carriers do an excellent job of telling you how many minutes you get with your plan, they do a poor job explaning to you exactly how they work. In this article we’ll remove the complicated mysticism surrounding your cellular minutes and how they are calculated.

For our example we’re going to use a basic plan with 450 anytime minutes, and unlimited free nights and weekends. We’re also going to assume you aren’t making any roaming or long distance calls. Our sample customers will have some irregular calling patterns, but this is just for the purpose of constructing an easy to understand examples.

Our first customer Jane Doe makes 500 minutes of calls in one billing cycle, here’s the breakdown:

Week 1: 125 daytime minutes
Week 2: 125 daytime minutes
Week 3: 150 nighttime minutes
Week 4: 100 nighttime minutes

Looking at weeks 1 and 2 we see Jane used 250 of her anytime minutes and 250 of her free unlimited night and weekend minutes. However that’s not how her wireless carrier sees it. According to her wireless plan, which is almost the same for all carriers, you use your anytime minutes first, no matter what time of day you make your calls. Once all of those are used then you can start using your nighttime minutes. It’s a subtle but important difference that will be made clearer in our next example.

Our second customer John Smith also makes 500 minutes of calls in one billing cycle, here’s his breakdown:

Week 1: 150 nighttime minutes
Week 2: 100 nighttime minutes
Week 3: 125 daytime minutes
Week 4: 125 daytime minutes

Comparing our two customers we see they both made 250 minutes worth of calls during the day and 250 minutes of calls at night. However when our customers get their bills Jane will pay her normal monthly fee and John will have overage charges.

As we stated above you have to use all of your anytime minutes first before using any of your night and weekend minutes. The first 250 minutes of Jane’s call obviously are anytime minutes, but so are 200 of the 250 nighttime minutes. So actually Jane used 450 anytime minutes and 50 night and weekend minutes.

Looking at John’s calls the first 250 minutes of calls he made, even though they are at night, are considered anytime minutes. The next 250 minutes of calls which were made during the day used up his remaining 200 anytime minutes and gave him 50 minutes of overage charges. Even though John and Jane spoke the exact same amount of time and during the exact same times of day, the order they made the calls affected their bill.

So what can you do to prevent overage charges? Well most cell phones come with a built in function to time all of your calls. At the beginning of each billing cycle you’ll need to reset your timer. It will automatically start and stop timing when our make and end calls. Get into the habit of checking how many minutes you have used each month. Try to get into the habit of checking every time you charge your phone, or at least once a week. If you are approaching your limit try keep your calls as short as possible. Once you are over your allotted number of minutes try to only make calls at night. If you find you are unable to limit your number of calls think about upgrading plans buying more minutes up front is always cheaper than paying overage charges. Knowing how you are being billed for your minutes goes a long way toward keeping your from getting hit with overage charges.

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