Preliminary Look - Verizon Phone Bill

I will start this post off by saving that I am a kind of a Verizon Fanboy. I've never had issues with coverage, dropped calls, or call quality. Verizon will pretty much work everywhere you go across the country. I feel like AT&T does too, but I don't have much experience with AT&T. Now that I'm living in Minnesota, I see a lot more people with T-Mobile. It's great to see another competitor around, but I personally don't think I would use T-Mobile. It works for people here because they're probably within a good radius of the Twin Cities to allow them to stay in T-Mobiles good coverage areas for Minnesota.

My family has had the Verizon bill on auto-pay for a long time. We don't really look at the bill as close as we probably should. Logging into my Verizon account tonight, I am sort of reminded why. The website is a bit clunky and slow. Verizon should take some tips from Google on how to streamline the site and make it easier to understand. Also when first logging in, there is a nice pop-up to greet you. Now, this is a pop-up notification to use points to buy stuff through Verizon, but still... I find this annoying.

Looking through the historical billing periods, when we had a phone with Verizon Edge, our phone bill was higher. I initially thought Verizon Edge was a good deal. Talking about Edge would probably take another post, so I won't get into it too much. Now that we don't have a smartphone on Edge, our bill is a little bit lower. So breaking up the bill, it looks like -

• Base Bill (Base Program/Account Charges)
• Individual Lines
• Equipment Charges
• Surcharges
• Taxes

All of the smartphone lines are being charged approximately the same price, with the newer of the smartphones costing about $9 more a month. Our 1 flip phone line looks like it's costing us too much, so I will have to look into that.

I will need to sit down with Excel or Google Spreadsheets and break these numbers down some more. What I would like to do is buy my phone either outright or pay for it through the phone provider (Apple or Google). I'm over paying for stuff through Verizon that isn't the core cell phone service. I didn't really provide much insight into the phone bill, but I'm setting up the framework to look into it further. 

Signed,

Mitch