Do you use a cell phone enough to warrant a one- or two-year cell phone contract? Do you have the extra money to lay out for a cell phone plan, especially a plan that would charge high rates (basically, penalties, is what it comes down to) if you go over the plan’s allotted time?

If you’re like a lot of folks, including children, teenagers, the elderly, and everyone in between, having a cell phone is first a convenience item (read that as “creature comfort”), but a lot of times these days, especially because pay phones are disappearing from major metropolitan landscapes. I can only imagine the horrors of the vanishing pay phones in small, out-of-the-way towns and villages around the U.S.

When I lived in the Midwest years ago, pay phones were easy to find: just find any gas station or convenience store. Today, though, even in major cities, such as Philadelphia, finding a pay phone is becoming more and more of a challenge. Why? Because so many people have cell phones, there’s just no profit in having a pay phone sit unused at a location.

Instead of phone companies — large and small — allowing a pay phone to remain at a location that isn’t generating enough revenue (profit), they remove the phone, sometimes leaving the housing that once held the phone. Finding one of those empty shells, especially when you’re running late for a meeting, is disheartening, to say the least.

Up until the mid-90’s, walking around almost any major city in the U.S., pay phones were found just about everywhere: in bars, at gas stations, at convenience stores, and almost every restaurant had at least one pay phone.

With the changes in landscape, in terms of the vanishing pay phones, having a cell phone on your hip or in your pocket is no longer merely a convenience item, it is becoming a necessity.

I am one of those people that look at the cost factor of everything. Yes, classify me with Scrooge, if you like, but I like making sure I get the most bang for my buck. For me, a cell phone isn’t worth the cost. For my home phone, my monthly bill for all services, including all my long distance calls, runs around $30, but then again, I use a VoIP phone. I make about 20 calls a month, which comes to somewhere around $1.10 per call, on average. That sounds high, but most of those calls are long distance calls, so compared to my old calling plan, using a landline and a local-and-long distance calling plan that ran around $90 per month (including taxes), I’m making out like a bandit.

If I were to invest in a cell phone contract, even for a basic plan, I would be paying more for just the monthly plan. Now, the catch. The calls I make often run 20 to 30 minutes. If the total monthly minutes used for calls is averaged out, each call lasts around 29 minutes. Sure, some last 70 minutes, others five minutes. Based on that, the most basic of cell phone packages would not serve me well.

About a year ago, while looking for options, I checked out getting a dedicated cell phone, which would allow me to ditch the home phone entirely. The plan I needed, based on my calling habits, would run around $130 a month. Yeah, right. That’s not worth my money. Keeping the VoIP phone is just fine with me.

But see, when I travel, I always have my cell phone with me, right in my shirt pocket.

Wait a minute! Didn’t I just say I didn’t have a cell phone? Yep, I did. But let’s get down to semantics. I said I would not sign off on a cell phone contract, as they were not right for my calling habits.

When I’m away from home, I don’t want to talk to people on the phone. Well, not unless I am running late for a meeting or I am trying to find out why someone isn’t at a meeting location at a specified time.

See, I’m not one of those people who go to a restaurant, order a soda and burger, and call 10 people, yelling into the cell phone during my meal, allowing everyone else to listen to my conversations. That kind of stuff irritates me to no end.

While I don’t have a cell phone plan, I do have a cell phone. It’s a Nokia, and pretty cool. On days when there’s something major in the news, I visit the CNN site and check out the news headlines, but that isn’t something I do regularly. Most of the time, though, my cell phone lives in my shirt pocket and serves as an alarm.

To make the best use of my money, I bought a cell phone that allows me to buy a certain number of minutes at a time. I generally buy 1,000 minutes for $100, and I have one year to use up those minutes. Most of the time, by the time the minutes are ready to expire, I still have 400 minutes remaining. What do I do? I just buy another $100 of minutes. Sure, I don’t need to get that many minutes at one time, but paying 10 cents per minute for 1,000 minutes at a time is better than buying 500 minutes for 16 cents a minute, right?

So, when it comes down to it, do your calling habits really warrant a cell phone? Is a cell phone really right for you? Or, when you get down to dollars-and-cents, is a pay-as-you-go pre-paid phone right for you? From what I see, many people could use a pre-paid cell phone. It’s certainly a lot cheaper to use as an emergency phone, as a road-trip phone, and for those who just want a “just in case” phone or phone number.

Check out various [1] prepaid cell phone plans here and let me know your thoughts.

This is a compensated message, but the content is mine, based solely on my experience. The only requirement for this compensated message was that they message be neutral, which it is, as you can see. You have no idea which carriers I’ve used, nor have I tipped my hand as to which pre-paid plan(s) I’ve used, tried, or tested. Pre-paid cell phones are terrific plans for people like me: people who don’t use a cell phone unless needed, and who would never use a month’s worth of calling time under traditional cell phone plans.

As I said, I’d really like to hear your thoughts on this issue. I have several friends who think I am the odd one because I don’t call them from my cell phone. Heck, there are about six people in the world who even know my cell phone number, which some resent. If I don’t use the phone, you know?