Carrie, nice article. The main thing I would mention to anyone considering switching to pre-paid cell phones, however, is that you should figure out first whether you can reduce your current cell bills down to acceptable levels--thereby saving often significant plan cancellation fees (AKA "early termination fees"), not to mention the convenience of keeping your present cell phone number. Importantly, there are still ways to effectively reduce your cell bill. Not to blatantly plug, but I work for the consumer advocacy website http://www.fixmycellbill.com, powered by a company called Validas, where we slash the average cell bill by 28 percent. It costs five bucks to implement our suggested changes to your plan (the average consumer currently saves around $450 annually through us) but we will analyze your bill for free without any commitment of purchase, just to let you know exactly how many dollars your carrier is ripping you off by. I could go on and on about how shifty these cell companies can be in their attempts to make you overpay. We stop them, and have currently saved consumers over $5,000,000 by auditing over 26,000 cell lines. You can check out Validas’s fixmycellbill.com in the national news media, most recently on Good Morning America at http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/MakeMoney/story?id=7640149&page=1.

Good luck to everyone reading on making an informed wireless choice.

Dylan