You might want to consider one of the pay-as-you-go plans. I have a Virgen Mobile phone. They require you to buy $20 of time at least once every 90 days. It costs 25 cents a minute for the first 10 minutes every day and 10 cents per minute after that. The time never expires as long as you buy $20 every 90 days. You can set up an automatic renewal so you always have service. We hardly ever use the phone so its a good deal for us - keeps our monthly cost down around $8. They advertise this as the hip phone for young folks but it works great for us old folks too. They do have some strange ring tones though.....