Getting Out of a 2-Year Cellphone Contract

I found this below very helpful and actually did break my contract.
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Getting Out of a 2-Year Cellphone Contract Alive
By DAMON DARLIN
The two-year contract. It is the bane of a cellphone owners existence,
especially one who must have the latest hot phone at a discounted
price.

Two years is a long time, and few other marketers can get away with
demanding it, much less adding to it. Every time you walk back into
the cellphone store or call the customer service operators, it seems,
the contract is extended. Lose the phone or ask for a replacement, and
the contract is extended. Sign up for a family plan, same thing.

But try getting out of a contract early? You can do it, but you will
have to pay an early termination fee of as much as $240.

Cellphone companies do not make it easy to break two-year contracts.
But it can be done through shrewd negotiating or by turning to the
innovators on the Internet who match contract sellers with people who
want to assume the contract.

Early termination fees are intended to compensate phone companies for
the discount they gave on the phone upfront. Most mobile phone
companies charge the full fee no matter when the contract is scheduled
to expire. Verizon Wireless recently decided to prorate the fee, and
some of the other companies do that in certain cities.

The companies will waive the early termination fee if you die.
Pretending to be dead, however, does not work well as a way to break a
contract. Sprint Nextel, Verizon and Cingular, for example, may ask
for a death certificate. T-Mobile says it does not. "They want to take
people at their word," said Graham Crow, a spokesman for the company.

Joining the military can sometimes work to break a contract if you are
going to be stationed overseas. Sometimes, though, the company will
suspend the service for the duration of active duty, which is not a
great deal. Upon returning home, you would still be stuck with the
remaining period of the contract and a much older phone. Buying a new
phone would only extend the contract further.

Next to death, moving to a place where your phone company does not
have service may not seem so draconian. Each company provides maps on
its Web site or at its stores that show the general service area, so
you can easily figure that out. But companies will ask for proof of
the new address. The T-Mobile spokesman warns that it has to be a
legitimate address, and post office boxes will not work.

There is an intriguing escape clause in contracts with phone companies
that offer roaming services, though it is intended to give the carrier
a way out. When a cellphone is used outside the providers network,
calls are routed through another companys network. The consumer pays a
monthly fee for this service, which the carrier uses to pay the other
phone companies to handle those calls.

Roam too much and your phone company starts losing money. Find a place
where your phone goes into roaming mode and make at least half your
calls from there. Every carrier said they would cancel the contract,
though it might take them a month or two to notice.

A more practical approach has been bandied about on a number of blogs
since October, when many carriers raised the price of text messaging.
They pointed out a clause in contracts that says if changes adversely
affect your rates or service, the consumer has the right to end the
contract early without paying a penalty.

It was not that easy. Some companies, like Cingular, now AT&T, refused
to budge, according to its spokesman. Sprint was more accommodating,
though a spokeswoman said Sprint approached early termination requests
on case by case. That means the consumer has to argue with customer
service.

Sprint says a customer will be released from a contract if a price
change has a material adverse effect on the customer. In other words,
prices have to go up, not down. The customer has to be actually using
the service in which the price changed. How much they are using it is
the critical factor. The spokeswoman said Sprint's customer care
representatives have guidelines, but she was not going to reveal them.

Though the contract says customers have 30 days after a price change
to get out of the contract, Sprint may be more generous. They can
always call customer care and see if there is a way to reconcile, said
Emmy Anderson, the Sprint spokeswoman.

Liza Tremblay, a 26-year-old owner of Bay Burger in Sag Harbor, N.Y.,
gave it a shot to get out of her contract with Verizon and avoid
paying $175. (She wanted to use Cingular because colleagues told her
the reception was better.) She followed a script she found on
Consumerist.com. I used a lot of big words, and I think I got across
the idea that I meant business, she said.

But then the Verizon service representative threw her a curve ball.
They wanted her to fax her contract so they could see the clause she
was referring to. She dug through her papers and found an old one --
she had been with Verizon almost 10 years -- and after a few more
transfers to call center supervisors, they let her out. "Obviously,
they had a copy of the contract," Ms. Tremblay said.

More often than not, the company will steer the customer into a new
calling plan rather than breaking the contract. "Typically, a customer
calling up is not dissatisfied with the service, they are dissatisfied
with their plan," said Brenda Rainey, a Verizon spokeswoman.
Nonetheless, she said, Verizon demands to see that a price increase
has a significant impact on the consumer. "We are going to look at
usage patterns to see if it is material," she said.

In other words, after a lot of machination and arguing, you may not
win in the end.

The solution might be, as it so often is these days, in the power of
the Internet. All of the companies allow a contract to be signed over
to someone else. So a number of entrepreneurs have created a new
online business in trading those contracts. The best known are
Celltradeusa.com and Cellswapper.com. For a fee, $20 at Celltradeusa
and $15 at Cellswapper, these companies will match a contract holder
to a buyer. The contract buyers pay no fee, providing them a way to
save on a phone and on activation fees.

The sites have search engines so you can find a plan length, minutes
and price that you like. Once the match is made, the cellphone company
arranges the transfer.

The risk is that you may not find a buyer; Cellswapper, however, does
not charge a fee until a match is made. Adam Korbl, the chief
executive of Cellswapper, said his service makes about 100 matches a
week and currently has 350 plans listed.

Be careful if you want to keep your phone number when you trade your
account, which you are allowed to do. Some of the phone companies use
this as a pressure point for keeping you on board, so make sure you
arrange with the carrier to keep the number before you transfer the
contract.

Derek C. F. Pegritz, an English composition instructor at Waynesburg
College in western Pennsylvania, wants to switch cellphone carriers
because of dropped calls, but he isn't sure how he'll do it.

"I'm shelling out $90 a month for a phone that basically sits there
and collects dust," he said.

But getting out of his contract will cost him $170. Mr. Pegritz has
tried to explore other ways to be released from the remaining year of
his contract, but the best he hopes for is a compromise by Cellular
One. "I'm looking forward to that about as much as I'm looking forward
to getting several teeth pulled next week," he said.

FOLLOW-UP TIP: A reader recently suggested a handy tool for bypassing
automated call routing at call centers. Get Human
(www.gethuman.com/us/) is a database of call center numbers
and the secret codes needed to get to a human.

helpful--I am going to use this today!