For as long as I can remember, my wife and brother always had a seperate T-Mobile account seperate from the one I manage. One day we decided that it just makes sense at this point to merge them into one account. Since my wifes and her brothers were off contract, we figured it’d be best to bring them into the account my brother and I share as it should be cheaper.. Right?

Wrong..

T-Mobile said the rate plans were not compatible. My brother and I had a contracted plan and Her and her brother had a plan that never needed a contract in the first place. In order to move them under my plan, T-Mobile said they were going to charge a $200 dollar migration fee.. PER LINE!!

I work a decent job in IT far beyond your entry level bullshit jobs.. I knew it was a bullshit fee they decided was ‘fair’ because some underpaid grunt outsourced from India to had to press a few extra keystrokes for this so-called ‘migration’.

I decided if I had to pay something, it sure as hell wasn’t going to be $400 bucks.

I asked if they charged fees for porting numbers from other carriers into T-Mobile and if they could replace numbers on existing lines with those ported numbers. The T-Mobile reluctantly said yes.. He was a manager and one of the brighter people I’ve dealt with. He could tell where I was going with my questions but it didn’t matter at that point. I had him figured out and had a plan.

Instead of migrating, I had two new lines added to my account. My brother and wife proceeded to get two shiney new smartphones at the wonderfully subsidized contract rate. I told them we no longer plan to migrate the lines and I’d rather wipe my ass with that money. The manager wasn’t liking me very much at that point, but gladly setup two new lines since supposedly there’s some comission in it somewhere. I dunno..

So what next? Google voice to the rescue!! For the uninformed, google voice is a number forwarding service. They can take a number, blast it to several phones at once, record calls, selectively block calls, transcribe voice mails, and a whole bunch of other usefull crap. I didn’t care about any of that though. What mattered to me was that it was free. I setup two new google voice accounts and forwarded them to the two new phones I bought.

There’s another secret of google voice. They’ll port existing numbers for only $20 bucks. So naturally I ported my wifes number into the account that points to her new phone and my brother-in-laws number into the account pointing to his new phone. So.. 40 bucks instead of 400.. I win. The rest is history.

Eventually I ported them back into T-Mobile for free since My wife and brother don’t care for having to learn an app and site for features they’ll hardly use. It was free just as the rep says. So there you have it.

How to get around the 200 dollar migration fees from T-Mobile