With the current financial crisis our country is facing nowadays, every peso counts. Here are some cell phone load/credit saving tips especially for those who are using prepaid accounts:
1. Don’t overindulge yourself in forwarding text messages. Imagine the savings you get if you ignore those chain text messages that tell you to forward the message to seven of your friends or worse to “fwd dis txt 2 ol d ppl n ur list”! It’s better to save your load/credits for more important messages.
2. Have an agreement with your friends or family members to acknowledge a text message with a short ring aka ‘miss call’ instead of a short text reply of “k” or “ok”. This saves you a peso for each text, and many more in the long run.
3. Have a stopwatch (you can use the cell phone of your friend or your wristwatch) in hand when making calls so you’ll be aware of the conversation time and know when to stop.
4. As much as possible, make your message clear especially if the recipient is not familiar with your text lingo. Don’t overdo your text speak. This saves you from sending a lot of unnecessary follow-up messages should your recipient get confused.
5. Make full use of the phone’s maximum character limit per message and type all you need to convey in one message instead of sending a series of SMS.
So that’s about it folks. The above tips are what we’ve been practicing in our family especially #2 and #3. Any more load saving tips you can add here?
Enjoy using your cell phone but be a smart and prudent owner.
Photo credits: Nate Steiner
This is one aspect in our household that we are really saving a lot. Only 1 person in our house loves to text and that’s my younger brother. But he uses a facility called “Unlimited Texting” so in a way he’s also cutting on cellphone expense 🙂
Great post!
Adie:
Unlimited texting is fine but it has also some limitations, the free SMS is only for the network subscribers but when sending to other networks, you still have a limit. It sure does help a lot if your textmates are just within the same network. 🙂
great tips, hope a lot would realize that. i get a lot of forwarded texts before from the philippines, and my goodness, that cost them a lot of money i think P10 or P15 a text. And also, here in US, we pay for both incoming and outgoing texts. I can control my outgoing texts, but not so much on the incoming. However, I do tell them that I would appreciate a voicemail instead since I pay for the incoming texts and did not get a text plan.
Betchai:
Texting can be addicting to some… they simply can’t say no to every message alert. 🙂 And they find those forwarded messages simply irresistible. That’s fine as long as you’re not on budget mode but I’ve seen some students wasting their credits/load on forwarded messages. Then once their load is all used up, they ask for more load allowance from their poor parents. 🙁
I wonder how the pinoys would react if the rule of paying for both incoming and outgoing texts would be implemented here… maybe lots of pinoys would go wild. LOL.