2. What Ate My Prepaid Money?

There will almost certainly be an expiration of your honestly purchased and otherwise unexpired minutes just for not buying more within a set amount of days. Alltel requires monthly replenishing of funds to "ensure continued service." This is rather like the nuisance of a bill - but with all the money going into your kitty to use, instead of a Verizonesque 99-cent daily tax for just existing on the plan. Virgin Mobile USA requires a $20 addition every 90 days. Some plans give not only longer expiration periods for greater globs of minutes purchased, but rewards of more minutes. For example, at T-Mobile, a $10 card expires in 30 days, and a $100 card is good for a year. The first time you add $100.00 in refills to your T-Mobile account, you automatically become a Gold Rewards customer and get "at least" 15% more minutes with every refill and your minutes do not expire for one full year. Look for the different rules on each plan.

A less obvious cause for money drain can be extremely presumptuous advertising. Example: If a person not totally inundated by and schooled in the slogans of every telco wandered onto a Web page for a Verizon pay-as-you-go plan called "INpulse," they would see a price list that included:

These prices are for Verizon-mobile-to-Verizon-mobile phone calls, not calls to any mobile phone, though it's difficult to grok that meaning from the Web page or the pricing table above. Most normal potential customers unfamiliar with Verizon's use of "IN" are likely to assume INpulse allows calls to any mobile phone whether it's a Verizon phone or not. Adding to the confusion is the fact that cents a day adds up to what it costs for a decent wireless plan that gives you a reasonable number of anytime minutes for calls to any phone, mobile or not. Now don't get me wrong internal mobile-to-mobile is a nice thing to offer, but in common English, when a parenthetical expression follows a made-up term, it usually explains the term. "Can you hear me now?"