Does Your Mom Pay Your Phone Bill? | Hacker News Reader

Does Your Mom Pay Your Phone Bill?

priceonomics.com

25 pointsAndrewWarner53 comments

Only skimmed through this, but it seems to miss one important point: In Germany (1st spot for self-sufficient teenagers in this study) it is perfectly possible to pay for the normal phone/text/data coverage as a teenager by using cash or maybe a bank account. In the US, however, you need a social security number, good credit, proof of address (i.e. unrelated items teenagers often do not or can not get) to purchase your average cellphone plan.

No you don't. I'm German and I've gotten cell phone service with several providers over the last few years even before I had a SSN / credit history / ...

So far I tried: Redpocket / T-Mobile (30$ Walmart/online plan) / AT&T Go Phone / T-Mobile Monthly plan / ...

All of them give you Voice Minutes, Data and Messaging. I just popped those SIM cards into my (unlocked) GSM phone and that was that.

I guess what you can't get are those 100$ / month with a "subsidised" phone plans. But I don't know why anybody would want these. Any of those options cost me less than 55$ / month. I'm currently on the T-mobile 30$/Walmart/Online plan. 100 minutes talk, Unlimited text, First 5 GB at up to 4G speeds. No need for any of the mentioned things.

p.s. and the ones I picked are only a small subset. H2O and Simple are even available at a lot of supermarkets.

What you've missed is that those 100$/month subsidized plans are about 30$/month if they're a new line on a family plan, whereas the other options don't have a cheaper grouped option. So they are the most economical (or close to it), and they look an awful lot like a teenager's parents are paying for it, even if they're paying their parents back in cash. I'm 23 and don't live with my parents and its still by far the best option.

I wonder if their survey captured the difference between teenagers who have their own plans, and teenagers who reimburse their parents (thus "paying" for their own phone bill).

I was wondering the same thing. I don't know how it is in Europe, but here in the US I, and a lot of people I know, do this to get in on family plan discounts that we'd otherwise be excluded from.

Plus, in the US, even if your paying the cost of your plan wouldn't it be dumb not to be a phone on a family plan? Splitting the family plan bill seems to be a lot cheaper than an individual plan.

T-Mobile is moving this way. I grab a T-Mobile SIM when I'm in the US and it's cheaper to discard and get a new one when I need it rather than top-up. I wait for the day of multi-use SIMs.

How so?

I have a T-mobile Sim for visiting the US. The plan is 2USD per day for unlimited calls and 2G-speed data, and I only top up the amount I need each trip (11 days means I top up 22USD).

If I were to get new SIM card each time I went the cost would be similar, if I were able to get a free sim (with no credit) or more if they don't have a free sim offer at the time.

Is there some deal with new sims of which I'm not aware?

I see my sentence was misleading: when I leave the U.S. I discard the SIM because, as you'll know, it expires after 3 months of no use and it's cheaper to get a new one for $20 on the next trip than keeping topping up while back home.

That makes sense. I didn't realise it expired in as little as 3 months.

If you need to do this regularly, I recommend keeping an eye on slickdeals.net, as people post there whenever T-mobile do their free or 99 cent sim promotion. IIRC you can order two sims at a time, and it seems like you get a cryptic error message if you've ordered a free sim from them in the previous 12 months.

Do you have to provide all that info just to get a prepaid plan?

Can a tourist get a SIM card in the US?

It can be easy to get a SIM in the US. But the companies make it difficult for some reason. Everyone is obsessed with credit. Get cable TV? They want your SSN to check credit. It's bizarre.

Even on a T-Mobile prepaid plan, they insisted on an SSN after a year and refused to charge my Amex. I told them I was Canadian, so they asked for a SIN. They said Amex required it. Only after getting Amex involved did T-Mobile back down.

There's about zero risk for them on a prepaid system. The risk is someone trying to exploit a hole in their billing platform, which is really quite minuscule.

It's a PITA to get a SIM card when visiting the US -- for example, I had to order online from T-mo's website, and they limited the number of SIMs to some arbitrary limit per calendar year (so good luck if you are in shared housing and the previous set of interns/tourists has exhausted the limit for the year).

Getting a SIM card in store seemed to require signing a multi-year contract, so I ran as far as possible before I could figure out whether they wanted my SSN or not.

The SIM cards for T-Mobile & AT&T prepaid come packaged with cheap (~$20) feature phones and are available in almost every national chain drugstore, supermarket, and general retail store in the US.

It seems wasteful to buy a feature phone if I know I have a phone that works on their networks, though.

No, I got a prepaid SIM in Germany by walking into a shop and plunking down 10 Euros. You can buy traveler SIMs that work with all sorts of carriers abroad, but it will be more expensive. If you can wait till you get there, it's not a big hassle.

In major cities, it's quite easy and becoming even more common to find prepaid SIMs available at small shops on every block. Here in New York, prepaid carries such as H2O and Simple have long been accessible and in-demand due to large tourist and immigrant populations who might not have established credit.

These sorts of plans are gradually spilling over into the tech community, as those with the means to purchase their phones up front for full price, see the value of a contract-less plan.

That's a good point. When I was 17 and wanted a phone in Australia, I needed an adult to sign the contract for me. My mother wouldn't do it, mostly because I would have had to take her to a store during a work day, so I got my 19 year old sister to put it in her name - I paid the bill myself (just as I would have if my mother had signed it for me).

(I don't remember if prepaid wasn't an option or just wasn't as good a deal).

This IMHO proves the dependence of US-american teenagers on their parents.

It shows a sort of artificial dependence imposed by society, but these teenagers could otherwise be independent in terms of emotional maturity and personal responsibility.

My father and his brother both 'ran away' from their (abusive) family when they were 16 and 15 respectively, in the late 60s. Bought a car with cash they had saved up, drove across the country, rented an apartment for a few years and worked various jobs before joining different branches of the military and eventually going to college.

A few decades later, I imagine this sort of thing as being near impossible for today's teenagers. Not because they are "wussier" or immature for their age, but because the world has changed and expectations that people have of teenagers and young adults have changed. Everything has more paperwork, everyone seems to expect background checks and credit checks. Teenagers and young adults seemingly need cosigners for damn near everything for their first few years away from home.

I had a lot of friction with this stuff in the 90's/early 00's when I was that age as my father's philosophy towards cosigning was "tell them that you can afford it yourself, and them to go fuck themselves." As late as 22 years old I had landlords that were hesitant (although ultimately not unwilling) to rent to me without a cosigner, even though I was gainfully employed and had fine credit. Even for that age range a lot of them seem to think that people being dependent on their parents is the norm.

Actually I don't think paying for the plan is the problem. There are many prepaid providers in the US. Many retail stores sell inexpensive phones and prepaid service for cash (hell even my local grocery store sells them). I tried several of these recently with my new Nexus 5. T-Mobile didn't even ask for anything other than a first name when activating and I got the impression that was so the customer service rep could call me by name.

So if obtaining service is really not the problem what is? Quite simply the problem is that most of these prepaid services don't sell the phones that a teenager is going to want (smart phones in general but iPhones in particular). It's only very recently that these sorts of phones have been supported at all by the prepaid industry.

Even when the phones are supported the American phone market is distorted by carrier subsidies. Many people don't realize how much cheaper buying a phone and using a cheaper service can be. The prepaid market on the other hand is not significantly subsidized (if at all). So kids and/or parents don't even consider buying a phone outside of a postpaid provider on a contract.

It's possible to buy a used phone for a fairly reasonable price, but then you're dealing with a potential mess of issues. You have to make sure to buy a phone that your chosen carrier will activate. Even some seemingly compatible systems won't activate phones sold by the other (Verizon & Sprint in particular). The phone might work and be allowed by the provider, but not have the proper bands for 3G/4G service (some iPhones on T-Mobile). Your carrier might refuse to activate service since they might say the phone is still under contract or stolen. For that matter the phone might still be carrier locked to another provider.

Even if a teenager has the cash to pay for their plan they often won't have the cash to buy the phone they want. So I suspect a lot of parents buy phones. As others have pointed out a lot of the carriers have seemingly low charges for adding additional lines. So combined with the additional line charge and the subsidized cost parents just add their kids to their own postpaid service.

Often times though these additional line fees are misleading, since they typically tack on more fees for data capabilities. Which racks up the price. Since this isn't clearly advertised a lot of people don't understand it and don't consider it in price comparisons with prepaid providers.

So in my opinion it's almost entirely about phone selection and phone subsidization. Those things drive tons of people to postpaid plans which of course do have the issues you point out. But as soon as you are willing to accept less fashionable phones those sorts of issues erode and there's nothing stopping a teenager from obtaining service (or for that matter even paying for a phone).

I'm 24, US, and I'm paying for my parents' and sibling's plans. I must be doing something wrong.

For the US though, perhaps the reason is that many teens start off on family plans and simply never move off because it's slightly more reasonably-priced on the whole?

Family plans are actually significantly more reasonably-priced, if you have several phones. Incremental cost for additional lines is very cheap.

On the contrary, I think you are doing something right. I do same thing myself.

I pay the additional cost ($10 line + $30 data) for my phone on our family plan.

This is drastically different from "paying my own phone bill" which would be $100/mo for equivalent service.

Lots of people now are taking advantage of family plans to get reasonable pricing. Even my personal finance teacher (fourtysomething) is on a family plan with his extended family - it's allowed and it's cheaper.

I've got news for you. You're getting ripped off by AT&T. Unless you are a heavy user $40 is more expensive than what you'd pay on a prepaid provider. There are a number of options such T-Mobiles $30 prepaid plan (that's somewhat hidden and includes 5GB of 4G data, unlimited texting and 100 minutes of voice), Ting (which can be very cheap if you are only a moderate user and as low as just $15 with up to 100 minutes, 100 texts, and under 100 MBs of data), and a bunch of other cheaper options.

I'd encourage you to look at your actual usage and reconsider these all you can eat plans. They really are not that great of a deal unless you're a high usage user, which a lot of people are not.

Another point I'll make is be careful about looking at your reported usage. I'm not sure about AT&T since I haven't had an account there in a while, but Verizon can be very missleading (often showing your usage rounded up to the next nearest whole GB e.g. 100MB shows as 1GB on the usage part of your bill). In the case of Verizon I had to retrieve a CSV file and add my own usage up to realize I wasn't using as much as I thought I was.

I live in the suburbs of a second-string city. In (and more importantly between) the suburbs and exurbs, prepaid and MVNO coverage is Swiss cheese at best.

My primary use case for cellular data is navigation, which is most important precisely where MVNOs and T-Mobile Prepaid are entirely dark. My first phone was T-Mobile prepaid and while their customer service was friendly, their network was not within an order of magnitude of useful if you got any further from downtown than my house.

This might be a good strategy for someone who never leaves a major metropolitan area though.

EDIT: Also I have Verizon, which is rock solid in this market. Since I ditched prepaid, I've never been without cell coverage except inside of very dense buildings.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of us out there that can't get service unless we're on AT&T or Verizon.

You know, I pay my own phone bill, but I don't really care if someone's mother paid their phone bill.

I can't understand articles like this one that want anything and everything to appear as a scathing indictment of millennials (or perhaps only millennials in the US).

Even if it were, so what? Parents don't live forever and if some are too dependent, they won't always have the luxury.

Nothing in the post indicts millennials, and in the post linked by this one, they even say that millennials find themselves "screwed by financial storms caused by another generation".

I am reading the title and the notion that "it's somewhat reasonable for your parents to pay your phone bill when you're a teenager. How about when you're a young adult" as slightly negative. As well as reading "Perhaps this is further evidence that in the US, millennials are pretty much screwed without the parental safety net?" as negative. While it's not an indictment per se, often these sentiments are indicative of an underlying "anti-millennial" thread. Perhaps I'm only projecting a subtext.

I am always skeptical of studies that make "teenager" a combined demographic with regards to their expected responsibility (as opposed to likes/dislikes, etc). Being 19 is worlds apart from being 15. At 15 I still lived at home, worked on some farm for ~nothing and my dad provided me with everything a parent should. This is pretty much what was expected at the time. (It was a while ago so a cell phone was not even really an option). But at 19 I had already moved out and was 100% supporting myself. This is also pretty much what is expected, at least by parents. :) So to lump them into the same group in a situation like this strikes me as odd.

Well, times are chanching and the adulthood is coming later than in the 70/80/90's nowadays. We have that whole adulescent[0] hing lasting well into the early 20's.

[0] Adulescent is a french word that is the contraction of the "adulte" and "adolescent" words. Basically: extended teenagehood into the 20's.

That seems like a good thing. I never understood why classmates seemed to anxious to get their own car, start paying their own rents, and so on.

I think the main thing is that on most of the major national carriers here in the US, it's cheaper to either pay your parents (or someone else) your portion of the line on the family plan (usually $9.99 + data plan), or in the case of the new share plans, $30-$40 for a smartphone. Compared to setting up your own individual plan which would cost even more.

Now, from experience, my sister (36) only just got off my parent's family plan this June. I myself (22) do not plan on getting off my parent's Verizon plan anytime soon because I want to retain unlimited data as long as it's available.

If it does get to the point of where they want be off their plan, I will have to go with T-Mobile or another pre-paid carrier because there is no way in hell I will pay $100/month with Verizon just to have a single smart phone.

It'd be interesting to look at how much of the 20-24 demographic is college students. In the US at least it's pretty normal for parents to pay for their children's phone bills while their in college[1]. Since about half of the 20-24 demographic is likely in college (in the US at least), I'm not too surprised to see that about half of the people in the US have their phone bill payed by their parent.

I'd be interested to see the demographic breakdown as high school, college, or not in school. I think it would offer more insight into a trend.

[1] This is anecdotal. I'm in college currently and most of the people I know are on family plans.

I don't get why that should be normal even if in college? I'd guess that 95-100% of my university class mates paid their own bills when I was in that age group in Iceland.

Personally I've been paying my own bill since I got my first mobile at 14 in 1999...

But I do wonder if this does actually include PayAndGo correctly?

In the US, family plans are often more economical so teenagers keep them when they go to college. I believe many people work out deals with their parents so that they pay for part of the bill.

If it were cheaper to get their own plan, most probably would.

I guess you might be right. I may be too used to the Icelandic mentality where if they'd notice something like that they'd think "Let's just allow for a sub-subscriber plan and charge them an extra 10% for a 'related plan' but with the same rates but different billing. They get there separation of concerns and we get a 10% extra."

That may have something to do with college (at least public universities) being free in Iceland and outrageously expensive in the United States.

That's a good point, I didn't go to a public one but even then the fees were easily covered by working full time during summer and part time along side uni: http://en.ru.is/studies/tuition-fees/ (~1500USD).

Unfortunately my MSc in the UK wasn't that cheap like that; ~26K GBP (42 USD) still paid my own mobile bill then.

From my experience, phone plans in the US today are kind of like rent-controlled apartments: The prices for new entrants keep going up, so you have a very strong disincentive to switch plans.

I have a 4-or-so year old plan with a major carrier. I looked in to switching during the most recent round of phone upgrades, and found that my grandfathered plan was at least 15% cheaper than anything on the market that matched my usage.

I suspect this is also a major disincentive to leave your parents' plan. Even if you pay the whole bill!

This looks like another one of those shallow statistics that people use to say "Ha, look at these kids, they're lost without us!"

I feel like a lot of people think like that because they don't realize that working with computers IS a job, even if you aren't working 9-5 every day unclogging sinks.

So if I don't pay my own phone bill then my Mom is paying it? There are other possibilities. Maybe my employer pays my phone bill. Maybe your mom pays my phone bill.

Mobile carriers in the US offer substantial price cuts for bundled phone services and very high average subscription prices. There's not enough information here to be useful.

In Brazil, it's a luxury to pay for phone/text/data, teenagers and young adults have to pay for themselves because their parents can't pay the bills anyway.

Where's that?

I spend ~$5 (R$ 10) a month on my prepaid data plan. I have to put ~$17 (R$ 35) in credits every 90 days or so.

to be honest... here in the US i know unrelated people that are in each other 'family plan' just because of price.

price here is awful, so, the more the merrier.

Phone service is also much more expensive in the USA. In the UK, I pay £25 per month, in the US it's $70.

That article comes to grand conclusions from a little bit of data.

Note that Indian phone market is primarily pre paid.

Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies.

wtf, I pay my mom's phone bill.

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