We all see the cell phone plan deals and minutes offered in advertisements. Whether it may be television, newspaper, magazines, or radio we all by now have seen the minutes offered with family plans and so forth.

The most popular of plans available at this current time is the 1,000 minute cellular plan. 1,000 minutes may seem like a lot and almost endless for your wireless calling consumption but in reality this may be far from a worry free calling plan.

A very important part of the decision process should be based on how many people are going to be using the calling plan. More importantly, who is going to be using your calling minutes. Are the users teenagers? How many of your children will be using the plan? Do you or your spouse frequently make calls? How long is the duration of most of these cell phone calls?

A somewhat simple way to calculate how many minutes you are going to need or may be lacking is to basically make some rough estimates of all possible user's monthly usage by rounding off into hours. Yes, hours not minutes.

In an Example:

Bob (Husband) 4 Hours

Sally (Wife) 3 Hours

Sue (17 years old) 5 Hours

Joe (15 years old) 4 Hours

FAMILY TOTAL: 16 Hours

Okay, so now you have put together the accumulated usage estimate. Simply dissect these hours into minutes. To do this is quite simple. All you have to do is multiply the hours by 60:

16 x 60 Minutes = 960 Minutes

The end result will be the amount of minutes you expect to spend on your cell phone plan each month. So with this family using 16 hours a month we have come up with 960 minutes.

In this scenario the family is just right for a 1,000 minute plan and that is lucky being you can expect to pay as much as .30 cents per minute after you go over your amount. In any case you should always use some math and fair estimates of how much cellular calling you really will be making.

In all cases the easiest way to pick a plan, especially for a single cell phone plan is to divide any plan by 60. Dividing by 60 you are dividing the minutes giving you an answer that equals in hours giving you a more realistic look at how much you will be able to call.