My mom retired several years ago. She only gets Social Security payments and has no other income. Because of this she has been forced to save as much money as possible. One way in which she trimmed cost was to get rid of her phone service. I was against this idea though. I told her that if she did not have a phone then I would not be able to call her and see if she was alright. Nevertheless, she still cancelled the phone service. I felt unease about this though. I talked to some of my friends about this problem and they suggested that I get her to apply for a free cell phone at Safelink Wireless.
My friends told me that Safelink would give her a free cell phone and airtime minutes. Granted, the minutes do not exactly amount to much but it was good enough for making calls every now and then. I figured this would be good for my mom because I would only need to call her once a week and only for a few short minutes of talking. I told my mom about this idea and she agreed. After all, she really had nothing to lose. The only thing required for her to apply for this program was that her income had to be within the limit set by the federal government. I think she would qualify since she is only living off of social security.
Now that my mom has a cell phone, I give her a call every weekend. We usually talk for a few minutes and I ask her how everything is going. I do not want to use up all of minutes so we keep the conversation short. I also reminded her not to make frivolous calls so as to waste her minutes.
