Cannot add basic phone to Family Share plan???

[DavidinNJ]

Hello, Verizon.

I am interested in adding a basic phone to my wireless plan for my son.  I don't need anything fancy.  He would just use voice and maybe the occasional text.  I have the AC Family Share 500 plan, which I know is no longer offered.  In the past, when I have added phones to my plan, I could do it for $10/month, so I figured that adding a basic phone for my son would incur the same change.

Apparently, I was wrong.

When I try to add the phone via Verizonwireless.com, it says that my existing plan is "not compatible" with the phone I added.  It is telling me that I would need to switch to the Share Everything plan.  Not only would that cost me an additional $50/month, I would also lose my unlimited data on the smartphones that I currently have on my plan.  I tried a number of different basic phones, and they all had the same result.

According to Verizon's own FAQ on the Share Everything, I should be able to add a new phone to my existing plan:

http://support.verizonwireless.com/support/faqs/CallingPlans/share_everything.html

"If you're a current customer interested in adding another line to your account but don't want to change your current plan to a Share Everything Plan, we offer three data packages that can be added to your plan, starting as low as $30 per month".

So this implies that adding a phone to an existing plan should be allowed, and if I wanted to add a data plan, then I could do so on a per phone basis (like I do today with my current plan).  However, as I have said above, verizonwireless.com doesn't allow this.

I also looked into the cost of a pre-paid plan.  However, that is $35/month (as opposed to the $10/month if I add the phone to my plan).  Plus, it isn't really pre-paid in the sense that when your account runs out of money, Verizon charges you per-minute, rather than just denying the call.  One of the nice things about pre-paid (or so I thought) is that you could control how much your child talks.  If you only want your child to talk for, say, 100 minutes, then you should be able to put enough on the account to allow him to talk for 100 minutes.  Verizon's pre-paid plan, according to the fine print, would just keep allowing your child to talk beyond 100 minutes, but they would just start charging you per-minute.  I'd rather have it work like a pre-paid debit card where you can put X dollars on the card, and then your child is limited to spending X dollars, and that's it.

Anyway, I digress...

My main question is how can I add a basic phone to my existing AC Family Share 500 plan?  Or is that really not possible any more?

[SuzyQ]

DavidinNJ wrote:

... My main question is how can I add a basic phone to my existing AC Family Share 500 plan?  Or is that really not possible any more?

America's Choice ... that is going back a ways!!  I think you can still "add a line" - but probably have to go into a corporate store in person and find someone who knows what they are doing, or by phone with a knowledgeable rep in order to keep the plan and simply add a line.  On line options will not give you that choice, as you have discovered.

[DavidinNJ]

Thanks SuzyQ for the reply.  I am thinking the same thing... talk to a human being and hope they can make it happen.