Pay As You Go: The Recharge

So, as I mentioned, I am doing all my phone and internet here pay as you go. I don't put a lot of Euros on at a time, so I have to recharge a lot. For both my phone and my internet, I have finally gone to pay cards.

My phone is with TIM. When I first got the phone, I put five Euros on there. That lasts me over a month! The first time I recharged, I went to a TIM store, where you fill out a form with all your details, and they charge you at the store. OK, that worked, but it meant going to a store and potentially waiting in a line. So the next thing I did was go with the website. You have to create an account, put in all your details, and charge your credit card. Let me say, putting in your credit card details online is fussier here than in the US. In some cases, you can't include a middle initial, even if it is on the card itself, but after some fiddling I got it to work. Still, it was a bit of a pain, and took far longer than I would have expected.

My internet is with 3 (Tre), and at first I was recharging online using my credit card details, running into the same sorts of issues. This month, I couldn't get the online form to submit for me at all.

The solution to my recharge problem in both cases has turned out to be pay code cards. Each company has their own name for it, like "Carta3", but it's all the same. They have the card system at many stores, including my local Penny, where I shop on average twice a week, where you simply grab a tag to show the cashier that says how much you want to recharge on what network. The tag is just for them to bar-code scan, you don't keep it. So they add the cost of the recharge to whatever else you are buying, it shows up on your receipt as any other line item. You can pay with any accepted payment method along with the rest of your stuff. And what they give you then is a 16 digit code in the form xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx printed onto a separate receipt. This receipt has all the pertinent data, along with instructions on how to use that number for recharge.

There are several options to recharge with this card depending on the company and your device. For my internet, one of the links on the company's landing page is to recharge, and you just say you want to recharge with a paid code and type in that number. For the phone, you can text the code to the company's service number (free of charge) or call them free of charge and type it in. You get a text a few minutes later showing your new balance. Easy. So this will be how I recharge my phone in the future.

I don't know if we have an equivalent system in the US. I think for some pay as you go stuff, you can buy cards, but they are physical cards you can take, instead of a simple code on a receipt!