I was talking to another agent last night in regards to a contact/offer we're putting together. She works for another company and asked why I don't have a cell phone and how I survive in this business without one.
The reality is that I do have a cell phone and a cell phone number. It's the number on my AR profile. When I went into real estate, I knew I wanted to have a great cell phone number that would be easy to remember. I think I did pretty good getting my number.
Here's how we did it.
First, the background. As I've mentioned in a few other blogs, my wife and I are the proud owners of three great teenagers. When they hit "I gotta have a cell phone" age, we ended up with FIVE cell phones in our house and a home phone. To cut expenses something had to go. Yep, it was the land line.
Our land line phone number was what my current cell phone is right now. How did we get that number? We asked. When we connected our home phone years ago, we wanted a cool phone number. So when we were on the phone with the lady hooking up our home service, we asked her if we could get a certain phone number instead of having one assigned. She said, "sure." Then she told us 3-4 that were available and we picked the one we liked.
When it was time to lose the land line, our cell phone company helped us out. We called them up, told them what we wanted to do - get rid of land line and keep our phone number - and they did it for us for FREE. They canceled our land line service for us and transfered the number to my wife's cell phone. I don't know if phone companies still do that, but that's what they did for us. This was several years ago.
Okay, so then I went into real estate (sometime later) and I wanted/needed the great phone number so clients could easily remember it. The phone company wouldn't help us out at that point. I had a number, she had the one I wanted...hmmm, what to do? And then the teenagers came to the rescue, God bless em!
Their answer? "Just switch your SIM cards!"
So we did. Suddenly, I've got the number I want. The wife has the other number and we're good to go.
Here's the best part (we think).
When we come home, we NEVER have to go right to the phone to check messages. Also, our home phone NEVER rings because we don't have one. AND we save an average of $40+ bucks a month not having a home phone bill. One other great thing is that the teenage fight over phone time went away!
The downside? In a major crisis cell phone service can be very unreliable. We learned that in the December ice storm. But think about it this way...who are you going to call in a disaster. Family, friends and the electric company right? I had full access to land lines in the office during the ice storm. Our office never lost power and if it had there were plenty of other places that we had access to if we needed a land line.
Getting rid of the home phone may or may not be for you, but it's a great option for us. My parents can't understand it for the life of them, but it's all good since we can't ever actually reach them on their cell phones!
Ain't life great!
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