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What's that on my bill? Text messaging!
From time to time, you see charges on your cell phone bill that you might not immediately understand. Here are some of the more common nickels and dimes that cell phone companies charge you to make millions, and how to protect yourself from these charges, in this case, text messaging.
While most cell phone companies would prefer to see you pay $5 - $20 a month for a text messaging package, there's no better way to suck money out of their subscribers wallets than casual usage charges - the per message charges that can accumulate and cost you hundreds of dollars per month.
Interestingly enough, the cell phone companies instruct their employees only to offer packages, and not proactively offer the following restrictive text messaging features:
- Premium text messaging: these charge up to $9.99 a month and are dastardly charges to get rid of. Commonly, you'll opt-in to these premium text messaging services using a five digit number (called short codes) for free wallpapers, ringtones, or astrology reports, not realizing in the small print is the monthly charge attached to them. These are not randomly sent to phones, but actually you have to opt in to these services twice. You can have premium text messaging blocked so that you don't have to worry about what other subscribers are doing to your cell phone bill.
- Casual text messaging: Known as SMS or text messaging, these are messages up to 160 characters in length that charge you ten cents to twenty five cents per message, sent or received. You can likewise block these by calling into customer care.
- MMS or picture messaging: You can block this a couple of ways - block your internet access, or some cell phone companies will have a special block for picture messaging. Make sure to ask which is right for you; each cell phone provider is a little different.
No matter what you decide, take the time to make sure that your messaging settings are correct on every subscriber. Each cell phone number carries it's own block, and most providers won't allow you to block at the account level. Remember once you have requested the block, turn your phone off then on to re-register and then make sure they're done by going online to check your account in 24 hours.
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