Personal Finance Lesson: Cell Phone Comparison Shopping and Research
Lesson Background
Students love phones...or at least they did until I made them spend an hour researching them
When trying to find examples to use in my Personal Finance classes, I like to focus on things that all students are familiar with.
So, when we discuss comparison shopping, I have the students practice the concepts by researching an item that they all have access to – cell phones. Using cell phones as an illustration, the class learns how to compare different service providers, as well as how to use Consumer Reports and internet sites like cnet.com to research product reviews.
The goal of the lesson is to give students an understanding of how to research big-ticket and other long term purchases. The hope is that at least a few of the students will find that understanding helpful later on in life when they are spending their own hard-earned money!
There are all kinds of ways to introduce this topic. Since students are familiar with cell phones already, I start the lesson off with a classroom discussion using one of those fancy questioning techniques that they only teach in Teacher College (sarcasm).
Specifically, I say “What kind of things would you look for if you were purchasing a new cell phone and plan?”
Most of the time, students are able to hit on the major areas like:
- Coverage
- Phone Features (E-Mail, Internet, Texting)
- Available Minutes/Texts/Etc.
- Family plans and rollover minutes
- Contracts vs. Pay as you go
Having covered what to look for in a cell phone plan, the discussion turns to why it is important to make an informed decision as a shopper of cell phones. Again, students are pretty good at coming up with things like:
- It costs a lot of money for a phone and plan
- If you have to cancel there are termination fees
After this has all been covered, I introduce the concepts of comparison shopping and product research and tell the class that they will be comparing plans from the three major providers, as well as researching the product reviews for a phone of their choice.
To complete the comparison shopping part, I guide the students to the three main cell-provider websites and advise them to find a plan that is similar in nature across all providers. That way, they are making apples-to-apples comparisons, so to speak.
For the product research part, Consumer Reports does a great, unbiased review of cell phone and providers every year. If you do not have access to Consumer Reports (I will not be posting any of their material, since they require a paid subscription), you can use cnet.com, which also has a lot of tech reviews.
The students document their research using a worksheet that I created in Microsoft Excel, which you will find linked below. Feel free to tweak it as you see fit.
Lesson Resources
Worksheet: Cell Phone Comparison Worksheet
Website: www.sprint.com
Website: www.att.com
Website: www.verizonwireless.com
Website: www.consumerreports.org
Website: www.cnet.com
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Wow! Great idea.
For me, prepaid rules. I did a bit of research and discovered NET10 was the best for my purposes. I don’t use a lot of minutes — maybe 200 or so a month — and I’m not a mad texter or websurfer either, but 10¢ a minute for calls and 3¢ for texts is crazy good. And no fees per day or other bs.
I got a very nice Samsung phone with a slide-out qwerty keyboard and no one knows it’s prepaid. Costs me a big $30 a month for all my stuff.
That’s a great point, Sam. I had not thought of it, but it would be a nice addition to include a prepaid vs. contract comparison as part of the lesson. Thanks for the input!