Hello Ladies and Germs, welcome to another week of saving money on all things related to your cell phones. If you haven’t checked it out yet, read about how I got my Pixel 2 XL for free by Phone Churning.
Today I’m bringing to you a little known hack of the phone-geoarbitrage, except you can still stay rightly plopped down on your couch. Providers call it, the Service Address.
You aren’t taxed on your billing address
That’s right! For once your billing address isn’t the one linking you to where you are taxed. The service address is one you provide to your cell phone provider. It is essentially the place you use your phone the “most”.
Yeah, I quoted most. You can stretch this a bit and choose a lower taxed county.
County Tax
In my case I am a resident of Washington state and located near the border if Oregon. If you didn’t know Washington has a sales tax and Oregon has an income tax. Well it just so happens that Oregon’s phone tax is significantly lower than Washington’s.
The tax’s are broken down by the county that you choose for your service address.
The differences are about $3 bucks per line for me. Let’s say you have a family plan with 4 lines, that’s a $12 a month savings. Take it to a year and that’s $144, not too shabby.
Find a service address that works for you
Verizon has a handy tool that estimates the taxes based on an address you enter.
Calculate Service Address Taxes
It does include some Verizon surcharges, so if you don’t have Verizon just ignore those.
After you enter your desired address, it’ll show all taxes associated with that area.
It’s easy to change your service address
Yup, you can do it online.
I’m on Verizon so I can only direct those who have Verizon on where you can change it. People with other carriers should have an option hiding somewhere in your personal info tab to change it.
Verizon instructions:
- Login to My Verizon
- Go to My Profile then select My Profile & Settings
- Scroll down to Wireless Billing Information and in that category it will show your current Service Address
- Click on Change Service Address
- Now change your Service Address for each line on your account
- On your next bill you should be taxed on your new Service Address.
Experiment based on your location
It’s convenient for me since I’m near the border of Oregon so it looks less suspicious if I set my service address there. I haven’t fully tested how far you can take it. I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t choose any address you wanted.
If they by some chance do check your service address against your GPS location, then they just change it back to your billing address possibly.
Feel free to experiment yourself and let me know in the comments below how far you were able to take it.
