First Virgin Bill

You may recall that, just over a month ago, Catherine and I switched from Rogers Wireless to Virgin Mobile for our mobile phone service. Today we got our first bill. For $172.03. Which is way, way more than I expected, and about $50 more than our last Rogers Wireless bill.

What happened?

Well, it turns out that Catherine and use our mobiles as telephones much more than I thought we did: 242 minutes for Catherine, 190 minutes for me. A lot of that talk was between ourselves (which is not billed per-minute), but enough of it was to others — 139 minutes for Catherine and 84 minutes for me — that we easily tipped over our 50 “included” minutes each, and so we ended up spending $100.35 extra for all that calling.

My worry going in was data, not voice. Turns out this wasn’t an issue at all: Catherine doesn’t use it, and I used only 151 MB for the month, which was within the $15/month 300 MB “pay per use data” plan that comes standard.

If we’d upped for the $35/month base plan (which included unlimited incoming calls, and free evenings and weekends), rather than the cheapest-possible $20/month plan we started with, our first bill would have been about $90 rather than $172.

So I’ve switched us up (fortunately Virgin makes this really, really easy to do online; the only downside is that the new plan doesn’t take effect until Nov. 6, so we’re stuck with the old one until then).

We’ll still come out ahead of the game compared to Rogers; it’s just taking us some time to find our way there.