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T-Mobile Will Pay Off Your Current Phone Up to $1,000 If You Switch
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Sadly, there hasn't been a reward for traditional financial responsibility for at least 15-20 years. It has been a long time that the interest earned in a CD has outpaced inflation.
The "smart" money these days would have taken the 0% loan on an iPhone Pro 12 and gambled the $1200 cash in the market (where it would have been hard to not see a 25% gain) or crypto (BTC up almost 400%)
hind sight (year) 20-20 LOL
on a more serious note, yeah the "system" hasn't helped at all. Not many save $ and the lending practices are "loose" to say the least.
the party has to end sometime.
Yeah, it's not like they have an offer of up to $1000 for current customers on Magenta Max with a trade in towards a new iPhone. Oh, wait . . .
Seriously, it's silly to leave a service provider just because they have new customer incentives that you're not eligible for. That would be like me leaving my $74.99/mo. ISP because they're not giving me the $19.99/mo. new customer special. LOL! It's simply understood that such a thing is a temporary offer that will eventually go up. Welcome to the real world!
It is a side effect of modern monetary theory that the government doesn't talk about - they don't 'print money' into your traditional bank account to offset the value lost of each individual dollar.
We are literally in a system that forces people into low interest debt in order to gamble to save for the future - which benefits the ones that rich (that have the credit and can afford to) and penalizes everyone else (that likely do not have the time, knowledge or extra money to risk)
Read the fine print, it has to be in brand new condition and you will be responsible for the amount that you owe to the carrier when you cancel the services and you won’t get the card until you have a good standing account for at least 3 months.
Once you said CD and inflation. I knew you understood that you have to "Invest" AKA GAMBLE to beat inflation just to KEEP your standard of living and PLAN for retirement.
Those "good ole days" of saving and being responsible are gone since they're not incentivized.
Charlie Munger "show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome"
Those "good ole days" of saving and being responsible are gone since they're not incentivized.
Charlie Munger "show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome"
Even if you buy the phone and pay it off monthly, T-Mobile only extends certain deals to those with specific plans and/or who pay an extra $10 or more per month for the insurance package. These deals are a ripoff, regardless which company offers them. With T-Mobile you have a lot of offers that you don’t qualify for unless you are stupid enough to switch from a grandfathered truly unlimited plan. I just ignore their deals and keep my grandfathered plan. As far as service goes, I get screwed over much less on T-Mobile than I did with AT&T and Verizon, so I’ll stick with them. It isn’t a question of which is best, it is a question of which is the least sleazy.
To answer the question, the normal terms apply - you have to have had your device financing contract in place for at least 90 days before they will pay off your device.
I read the terms and didn't see any mention about having to stay with T-Mobile for 3 years or keep the same iPhone for 3 years which means you can leave T-Mobile as soon as you get the prepaid Mastercard.
I'd use up the balance on the prepaid card ASAP too just in case and because terms state balance expires in 6 months.
Actually, when I was with Sprint I saw what I described already going on with T-Mobile. This prompted me to do a trial run with Verizon.
Decided not to switch because service didn’t change we were not in the market for new devices. So yeah, real world does include investigation and T-mobile continues to disappoint.
Heck, T-Mobile didn’t even try to proactively keep me with them when the merge finally happened. Another real world disappointment.
I don't know of any cellular service providers (or any company for that matter) that every 2-3 years or so says, "Hey, we wanted to thank you for being our customer, so we're going to apply $1000 to your future bills". LOL!
What exactly are you wanting T-Mobile to do for you as a current customer that they're not doing now and that other cellular providers ARE doing?
Not necessarily a bad deal for those with newer phones.
Pay T-Mobile $50/month for 3 or 4 months and get upwards of $600 to pay off your current phone.
You still come out ahead AFAICS.
This is meant to help folks pay off their phones so they can remove that from being a detractor from transferring to them. You bought your phone outright so you have the privilege of moving anywhere you want
YUP!!!! i got tired of getting a notice every few months that my info has been exposed by various companies that i now have permanent ID theft. Everyone really should have it now a days.
???
Here's what the "fine print" on the linked page actually says. No mention of "brand new condition" and nothing about having an account in good standing for 3 months with T-Mobile. It does say, "90+ days with device & eligible carrier" is required, but obviously that's referring to the carrier you're switching from, not T-Mobile. I'm guessing that's to keep people from signing up with another carrier and then immediately switching to T-Mobile to get a free phone.
OPM and Equifax
I work in IT. Unless you live in a cave off the grid you need to operate under the assumption that somebody has all the keys to your identity and your credit card or debit card number because there have been so many disclosed breaches, let alone those that have not been disclosed including those that haven’t been disclosed because the IT department isn’t even aware they’ve been hit, that you must assume your information is out there and operate that way.
Pay for a legit identity protection service that will not only monitor your credit but lead the response if/when identity theft happens. Yes it’s one more monthly fee but trust me when I tell you it’ll be worth every penny if you ever need it.
Further get rid of your debit card. Toss it. Do not use it. Deposit your check into an account without a debit card associated with it.
If you have to use it transfer only what you need for the next day or two. Everything you’d pay for with a debit card should be paid with a credit card. Pay off the balance monthly or if you don’t want to spend so much time tracking things pay it off nightly or weekly. Seriously. If hackers get your debit card number that cash is gone and you’re SOL. You can get it refunded after jumping through hoops but it takes time. Credit cards do not leave you exposed. You can dispute any fraudulent charge and the credit card company will investigate. You are not on the hook for that charge while it’s in dispute and you will still have cash in your bank account. Pick a card with quality rewards or if you don’t want to play that game get the card with the best cash back percentage that you can get. As long as you pay your balance monthly you’ll come out on top by cashing in on those rewards or that free cash back.
Do not be a victim. We regularly go into small and medium sized business and do a complete top to bottom security evaluation that we have a third party audit as well for a second set of independent eyes. You wouldn’t believe how exposed the client data is for the majority of the companies we deal with. We’re taking cities, townships, police departments, fire departments, EMS services, doctors, lawyers, accounting firms, construction companies, you name it. We’ve seen it. Whether it’s data on their own employees or data on their clients it’s generally not well protected so you better assume somebody somewhere has your information and operate that way.
i used to be a sales manager for a competing brand and we offered the same premise, except it was meant for financially abled customers, it was somewhat of a bad deal to consumers because they were caught off guard to be honest, the credit is how much they can give you upwards to that amount and not $1,000 as a matter of fact, “Qualifiying unlocked Device” has to meet their requirements to be worth some money and that always meant having a near brand new phone, we always told customers to get it repaired through applecare or Asurion to get the most amount of the trade in, even then *credit* check is a hard one to see how many lines you could do and you would need a perfect phone number, but the threshold is always 3 months to get the credits or gift card with any provider to ensure brand loyalty, ATT, Verizon and Tmobile all want your business but they favor phone numbers from other carriers to meet their monthly quotas.
It’s a shady business but makes their world go around, the trade in part always left people owing more money than they actually owed to be honest and let’s just say some customers never owned their iphones with the forever iphone program sprint used to have….