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How much did you spend on your cellphone last year?

Yeah, that's crazy. Me? I spent $200 last year for my mobile phone.

You read that correctly: $200 a year. Not a month. A year.

How? Using a Virgin Mobile pay-as-you-go plan (they're not just for drug dealers anymore!)

Virgin Mobile has a crap-load of plans now, but since I don't talk much on the phone, I like the basic one: 18¢TALK plan.

Frankly, my typical mobile call goes like this: Hello? Hey, Tom! Great to hear from you! Lemme call you back from the landline phone I have sitting right next to me. Bye!

I mean, seriously, how often are you that far from a free land-line?

Now, despite a seemingly high price-per-minute, their 18¢TALK plan is actually pretty cheap when you consider that you're not paying any monthly fee. Most other mobile plans really cost more per-minute than the advertised cost because people don't use all their minutes every month. (On my old plan, I was paying $29/mo. and only using around 100 minutes a month, so I was paying 29¢ a minute!).

Plus, there are no roaming charges (anywhere in the country), no "weekend, nights, etc" confusion, and no shockingly high bills that usually follow.

In fact, there's really no bill at all. As a pay-as-you-go system, you just give them a credit card, and whenever your account gets low on cash (or 90-days go by), they automatically bill you another $20 to keep it going.

Virgin Mobile offers most of what you need a mobile phone to do in an ala cart approach. If you need a service, you have to pay a little extra. Texting and web-browsing aren't cheap on VM, but how often do you really use those services? (And if you need them often, just look at one of their other plans).

As for call quality, they lease Sprint's PCS network, and it works great. I don't drop nearly as many calls as I did with AT&T, and only slightly more than I did when I had Verizon.

And since you only pay for your actual use with VM, in the long run, you save a boatload of money.

In all, I find VM has a much better system than Amp'd Mobile or even other traditional providers (AT&T's pay-as-you-go plan is a rip-off).

When the price and plans come down in cost, I'll get an iPhone and melt the screen using all the gee-whiz features like everyone else. But until then, I'll just use my phone for what God intended—frying my genitalia.

NOTE: Do NOT get the 'Slice'. It's a terrible phone. It overheats after two seconds and dials 911 calls in your pocket even when you have keypad-lock engaged. It flat-out sucks.