Low Income Phone Service

My family has been living under unfortunate financial circumstances these past few years.  I lost my job and currently have no other source of income.  Due to our financial hardship, we had to apply for several government programs just to get us through.  One of the programs we applied for was the low income phone service.  Through this service, our family got a free cell phone including free minutes.  Some of our friends have asked us why we need a free cell phone.  There are many reasons to have this cell phone.  First, we could not afford our home phone service so we had to cancel that.  Since we did not have home phone service, nobody could call us even for emergencies.  If we wanted to make emergency calls we would have to go to our neighbor’s home to make the call.  I did not want to bother anyone like that so I knew we had to get our own phone.

Once while we were over at a friend’s house, the father of our friend had a heart attack.  Our friend also did not have a home phone so I used the free cell phone to call emergency.  The ambulance came and took my friend’s father to the hospital.  He was lucky to have made it there in time.  If I did not have the cell phone, the situation could have been much worse.  My friend even asked me how he could apply for the low income phone service. 

I told him that he could apply by going online and looking for the cell phone service provider that offers this program.  He should be able to qualify as long as his income and assets were below the federal poverty line.  I warned my friend to be careful when using the cell phone though.  The phone service provider only gives limited amounts of minutes per month so it would be wise to save those for real emergencies.