Normally when it comes to cell phone bills, my wife and I rarely go over the free minutes, and usually auto-pay the bill, which normally is around $90 per month ($69.99 for T-Mobile Family plan with 1000 whenever minutes + $4.99 for text messaging + taxes, fees and surcharges). However, we exceeded the minutes last month, and was hit by the dreaded $.35/min charge for an extra 107 minutes we went over.

New Bill: $127.87 up ~40%

So, I decided to take a look at the T-Mobile bill for a change; yes, the much talked about long cell phone bills, to see all those impressive taxes, fees, and surcharges the cell phone companies have come up with to get an extra 20-30% from the dumb consumer. Even credit card companies don’t seem as bad, at least they let you know the interest rate up front.

1. Taxes, Fees and surcharges on the base monthly service charge of $69.99

That comes to about 13% in taxes, fees and surcharges. Now isn’t that crazy, well it gets even crazier when you go over your minutes. So let’s see what the numbers look like when you go overboard. In our case there are two phone, so below I am going to break down the number for the first phone, and summarize the numbers for the second phone.

2. Taxes, Fees and surcharges on Phone 1 for a usage charge of $22.95

As you can see, more surcharges have been tacked on, taking the tax percentage to ~20%. The second phone had additional usage charges of $12.25, and a tax charges of $3.84, making it a 31% tax rate.

The final numbers, total charges $110.18 + taxes of $17.69, making it an approximate 16% tax rate. Could there be a bigger scam?! I really wonder how much of these taxes, fees and surcharges actually end up where they need to, and how much of it actually ends up in the phone companies coffers?

As for me, it’s time to cut down talking on the cell phone, over 1000 minutes a month!! I think I am starting to feel that brain tumor growing on the right side of my head!