The budget choice depends a lot about cellular date requirements. I have very low cellular data, most occurring from home or wif hot spots.
I used to be quite a gadget geeky then started listing my requirements and realized they were 90% met with a Tracfone where the phone is bundled with a $100 a year (depending on which phone you pick) plan. If you need more data or texts you can add those on as needed. Subsequent years are under $100/yr if you shop for a deal.
I have several phone geek friends who pay multiple times as much and do very little with their phone that I don't, but I don't stream TV shows/etc to my phone to watch on the go, that just seems silly to me to watch on a ~5" display since I have smart TV, computer, tablet, and no long passive commutes like a train where I desperately need that, and yet if I did, I could just pop content onto the mSD card on the phone. Do have a nice big mSD card, enough for all your music collection and as many videos as you care to watch in a few days. Given the cheap flash prices these days, that's about $15 for 128GB.
IMO, paying much for a phone made sense when phones were in their early years and you got much more for the money. Today, people who paid $400+ whether outright or subsidized through a costly plan, often envy my sleek thin, much cheaper plan and phone.
