Verizon Wireless will terminate your service for good cause if less than half of your voice or data usage over three consecutive billing cycles is on the Verizon Wireless 3G Data Coverage Area. Global Customer Support Verizon Wireless offers 24/7 customer support while you are traveling abroad. Dial +1-908-559-4899. The charge is the greater of $5 or 1.5% per month, or as permitted by law. Verizon Wireless' Other Charges and Credits. Includes charges for products and services, and credits owing. Use this space or sign in to My Verizon at www.verizonwireless.com to change the mailing address where we send your bill.
![Bill Bill](https://letsgonepal.com/x/2019/01/phone-bill-template-14-reasons-verizon-invoice-and-resume-template-ideas.jpg)
We’ve spent a few months looking at why are so confusing, and where all the fees come from. But if there’s one bill in our virtual mailboxes that’s even more bloated and byzantine than pay-TV bills, it’s wireless bills.
![Bills Bills](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125407804/473350219.jpg)
Hundreds of millions of us get them, but odds are that most of us don’t understand every fee, tax, or surcharge we pay. So now it’s the mobile industry’s turn under our microscope. Up first: Verizon Wireless.When you sign up for a mobile plan — some combination of voice, text, and data — you agree to pay something like $39 or $75 per month for your service. But when you get your actual monthly statement, the price you pay can be more than 50% on top of that advertised rate, thanks to a heap of sometimes confusing charges and fees.Who’s to blame for these extra costs?
Everyone from state and local governments to the wireless provider itself. How can you tell which is which?The below bill is my family’s actual Verizon Wireless invoice. We have a shared family plan with two smartphones on it — a pretty common scenario, especially for couples without kids or with kids too young to need or want a phone of their own — for the nominal rate of $45 per month.However, the total paid each month is $125.77. That means that of the total monthly bill, just over $80 — or 64% — is actually some kind of additional cost, charge, tax, or fee. Some of those are expected; some are not.
Here’s how it all breaks down.A Note: Mobile bills, as pieces of paperwork, tend to be sprawling; this sample from Verizon is nine pages long. To that end, we’ve done some cropping and re-aligning to make the relevant parts easier to read and discuss, and we’ve had to break it all down into multiple images. Aside from redacting personal or identifying information, however, the bill’s actual content remains unchanged. OverviewVerizon provides an overview of billing, and how it’s apportioned to each line, up front, along with a description of the subscription plan.We haven’t broken it out here, because the line-by-line breakdowns that follow are more descriptive, but this one-shot view of which charges are apportioned to which line does appear here first.If any line on the account had gone over its allotment of talk minutes, text messages, or data use, overage fees would also appear here in a quick-to-view grid.
RED numbers (1, 2) are Verizon-originated charges or credits. Account Charges and Credits1.) The Verizon Plan Medium 3 GBThis is the quoted price for the service bundle you subscribe to. In this case it’s Verizon’s “Medium” service tier, which includes 3 GB per month of data and unlimited talk and text. The data pool is shared among all devices on the plan.On its website, Verizon describes the plan like so:This is the “simplified” plan structure Verizon rolled out in.
(We have been Verizon customers for ten years, but we were off-contract for several months at the time of our last phone/plan upgrade in Nov. 2015, and so we were rolled into the “new customer” structure.)While Verizon puts the monthly rates of $30 to $100 for these plans in big bold type, the finer print below the ice cream cone images explains “Plan cost per month. Plus $20/month/smartphone purchased on device payment.
Taxes and fees apply.”Thus, as we get into later, the cost of a plan is the advertised base rate plus $20/month per smartphone.2.) 21% Access DiscountWe get a discount from Verizon thanks to an agreement my husband’s employer has negotiated with Verizon Wireless. ( KEY: RED numbers 3-12 are Verizon-originating fees; BLUE numbers 13-14 are government-mandated fees) Monthly Charges3.) Smartphone Line AccessAs mentioned above, Verizon charges you $20 per month, per line, for having and using a smartphone. This is not a charge for data usage, nor is it any kind of device payment plan. It has nothing whatsoever to do with any usage. Thus, we pay Verizon $40 a month, on top of our $45 usage subscription plan, simply because the phones on both lines are smartphones.(This is different from the one-time $20 customers incur when they upgrade their phones, or the one-time $20 they charge customers when those new phones are turned on.