savebrettjones
09-12-2007, 09:00 AM
Thanks to some information I received here, I have been able to cut my phone bills by more than half. I'm in Illinois but support a child in Mississippi (Walnut Grove Juvenile Facility). For him to call me it was costing (incl. taxes) $19.97 per 15 minute call. We got a little less than 3 phone calls out of a $50.00 ($60 incl. taxes) deposit on the prepaid account with IC Solutions. (if you deposit $50 they waive the $4.95 processing fee, which you pay every time you deposit less than $50.) Brett calls about 8x a month which is only a couple days per week but the bills were about $200/month. He only gets a visitor about every 4 weeks and sometimes 16 or 24 weeks if his family blows him off, which they do alot. So 8 calls isn't much for a child to talk to someone who cares. The taxes are more than any phone company charges. How do they get away with that?
MY SOLUTION: (to IC Solutions Ripoff)
Since Brett can call a cell phone, I obtained a Mississippi phone number on a prepaid account with T-Mobile. Now he can call me at the Mississippi rate of .25/minute instead of .89/minute. If he calls in the evening or weekends it goes down to .19/minute. The $9.97 in taxes I pay every time I deposit $50 in the prepaid account is spread over 8 calls instead of 3. So, I'm a happy camper now (well sort of, it would be better if he was home, but...) I'm a happier camper.
I would advise anyone who is out of state and the inmate can call a cell to do the same thing if the rates are different for in-state and out-of-state calls. I have to go through IC Solutions because my phone company (Comcast) won't do third party collect calls from a company like IC Solutions, so I have no choice but to prepay. But I think this is even cheaper than collect in state. The prepaid phone card with T-Mobile is .10/minute if you purchase $100 or 1,000 minutes and you get 15% more minutes every time you add. Or you can get 400 minutes for $50 which is about .12/minute (next best value). The $100 sounds like a lot at one time, but it comes to .10/minute and will give me 66 calls which I know we will use because this child is serving Life (you have a year to use them). I'm better off paying the $100 up front and getting the lowest per minute rate plus automatically am eligible for the %15 free minutes in the gold club (or something like that). I'm a happy member of the Gold Club. Thanks to my little prisoner. Maybe we could do a commercial for T-Mobile. The Gold Member Prisoner Club! Run it during the Super Bowl! ("get more out of a child serving Life, join the Gold Club") hehehehe. So now our calls are .19 + .10 (t-mobile minutes) = .29/minute compared to .89/minute out of state (even the IC Solutions high tax rate is diluted from $3/call to $1.25/call.
When I started researching this, I met a few roadblocks with T-mobile trying to add a MS line to my family plan for $9/month since you can add up to 5 lines and I only had 4 (the best deal of all) but all area codes have to be the same in the family plan. So unless I switched all 4 lines to MS from IL, they wouldn't allow it. So I went with the prepaid acccount.
Thanks to whoever posted this suggestion. I was just reading posts one day and ran across this. I think it came from someone in New Jersey. I hope this will help someone else too. I knew there was a solution and it wouldn't come from IC Solutions. In fact the other day when I deposited money down their "dumper", I told the operator that I got a MS # and now they won't be getting so much of my money, she said "oh you figured it out huh?" Damn straight I did! Thanks to this forum.
MY SOLUTION: (to IC Solutions Ripoff)
Since Brett can call a cell phone, I obtained a Mississippi phone number on a prepaid account with T-Mobile. Now he can call me at the Mississippi rate of .25/minute instead of .89/minute. If he calls in the evening or weekends it goes down to .19/minute. The $9.97 in taxes I pay every time I deposit $50 in the prepaid account is spread over 8 calls instead of 3. So, I'm a happy camper now (well sort of, it would be better if he was home, but...) I'm a happier camper.
I would advise anyone who is out of state and the inmate can call a cell to do the same thing if the rates are different for in-state and out-of-state calls. I have to go through IC Solutions because my phone company (Comcast) won't do third party collect calls from a company like IC Solutions, so I have no choice but to prepay. But I think this is even cheaper than collect in state. The prepaid phone card with T-Mobile is .10/minute if you purchase $100 or 1,000 minutes and you get 15% more minutes every time you add. Or you can get 400 minutes for $50 which is about .12/minute (next best value). The $100 sounds like a lot at one time, but it comes to .10/minute and will give me 66 calls which I know we will use because this child is serving Life (you have a year to use them). I'm better off paying the $100 up front and getting the lowest per minute rate plus automatically am eligible for the %15 free minutes in the gold club (or something like that). I'm a happy member of the Gold Club. Thanks to my little prisoner. Maybe we could do a commercial for T-Mobile. The Gold Member Prisoner Club! Run it during the Super Bowl! ("get more out of a child serving Life, join the Gold Club") hehehehe. So now our calls are .19 + .10 (t-mobile minutes) = .29/minute compared to .89/minute out of state (even the IC Solutions high tax rate is diluted from $3/call to $1.25/call.
When I started researching this, I met a few roadblocks with T-mobile trying to add a MS line to my family plan for $9/month since you can add up to 5 lines and I only had 4 (the best deal of all) but all area codes have to be the same in the family plan. So unless I switched all 4 lines to MS from IL, they wouldn't allow it. So I went with the prepaid acccount.
Thanks to whoever posted this suggestion. I was just reading posts one day and ran across this. I think it came from someone in New Jersey. I hope this will help someone else too. I knew there was a solution and it wouldn't come from IC Solutions. In fact the other day when I deposited money down their "dumper", I told the operator that I got a MS # and now they won't be getting so much of my money, she said "oh you figured it out huh?" Damn straight I did! Thanks to this forum.