Cell Phones

I meant to post about this long ago, but better late than never. A few days into our trip, we invested in cell phones (first time I've ever done that abroad; Maggie had her first cell phone ever during her trimester in Paris in 2003!). We got the cheapest flip phones we could find - 49 euros apiece.

We could have gotten free phones with a contract - and apparently you can break contracts if you can prove you've moved abroad - but contracts started around 20 euros per month, and I was convinced we could spend less than that doing the prepaid thing. Even with what we paid for phones, as long as we buy less than 16 euros of calling time per month, we'll still save money over the calling plan.

I don't know how pre-paid plans work in the US, but with SFR (our provider) you can add anywhere between 1 and 65 euros at a time. The catch is, a 1 to 5-euro purchase is valid for only one week; a six to 10-euro purchase is valid for two weeks; an 11 to 15-euro purchase is valid for 30 days; and I'll stop there because I hope to never purchase that much call time at once. Basically, no roll-over minutes here. I've found that in order to avoid wasting calltime I've already paid for, I end up using more time than you need/want to and buying more time before the week or two weeks or month is up. Very clever, SFR - very clever indeed.