A data plan can be an important tool to teach budgeting to your kids.
As a Dad of a little one, I know that one day my wife and I will have to answer the question "At what age is our little girl going to have a smartphone?". Right now, friends and older brother and sister in laws who have teenage kids, I am starting to see their kids being add to cellphone plans because of the kids' extra-circular activities, being latch key kids (home alone after school), or responsible enough to go to the mall or amusement park with friends. Don't get me wrong, I think this is a wonderful idea when their kids starts to show great responsibility and decision making on their own. There is a real teaching moment here for your teen about personal responsibility with a smartphone but more so in teaching budgeting that can be lost if they are on your plan and not their own pre-paid plan.
Pre-paid plans are not what they use to be
Yes it is convenient for your teen to be on your cell plan because it means you are only playing one bill to one source but if you have tracked data plans over the past three to four years you would know that data equals money, to the carrier and you. Go over that data limit and your monthly bill sky rockets (ask my mother in law who had her grand kids on her plan, ouch) to twice or maybe three times your monthly bill. So what is the solution? Pre-paid. Now before you are start laughing you need to understand that because of T-Mobile, pre-paid plans on Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile (ignoring Sprint because all their plans can't make up for the horrible network they have) have gotten really good with quite a few of them being better than "contract" plans depending on personal preferences. There are also other plans like Virgin, Straight Talk, Boost, Cricket, and Metro PCS mobile and they run off Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile's network. With the big three mobile carriers, there use to be contract networks and pre-paid networks meaning contract customers got the better network and people who were pre-paid got the less of the networks that got spotty service at best. Now, everyone, contract or pre-paid, uses the same carrier network regardless of contract or pre-paid "status".
Benefits of a pre-paid plan?
Budgeting. Like money, data has to be budgeted as well when using your smartphone. With a pre-paid plan you can start your teen with just 500mb or 1GB of data to teach them to learn to budget their data through the month. Like money, if they blow through their data in the first week of the month, then they can't use their favorite social media apps or some games away from home wifi as they will be cut off from carrier data or in the case of some carriers, the data will be slowed so much it will make it frustrating for your teen to even attempt to use it. Hopefully this will lead to better decision making about using their data on their smartphone away from home.
With a pre-paid plan, you can actively control your teen's plan from month to monthly depending on their behavior. If one month their grades are slipping on something else they are doing is showing their immaturity or irresponsibility, you can outright cancel their plan the next month for no cost where as if they are on your plan, you are paying for their line no matter what. You can also reward them if more minutes, texts, and/or data the next month if they have achieved something remarkable like higher grades, recognition of community service, etc. With pre-paid plans you can change the plan month to month without having to worry about sticking to a contract and paying regardless if the line is used or not. So if your teen shows enough bad behavior to warrant them not having a smartphone next month, the silver lining is you can save money for that month.
So with the holiday season coming and you have decided that your teenager as earned a smartphone, you can also remind them they have to keep earning their own cellphone plan and teach them they will have to learn to budget data on what is important and what isn't, just like they would budget the money they earn from their job.
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