Issue time
11:47 am , by
CTreit
Category:
Uncategorized
Forget Needs and Wants. Focus on Use Instead!
October 5th, 2010When the contract with our cell carrier was up, we took this event as an opportunity to evaluate our cell phone plan and usage. Well, it’s also that the wife’s cell phone is on its last legs. She can’t use the “s” on her phone keyboard anymore. Zo, zhe zendz me text mezzagez like thiz one. Time to replace it and buy a new one.
While we were at it, we decided to evaluate all our communication/entertainment expenses. This also includes our house phone, our cable plan, our internet connection, and Netflix.
I don’t want to get into boring details but we find it very hard to save money with the way these various services are priced and packaged. It seems like these communication and entertainment companies have set up plans that Hoover the money right out of our pockets with a “giant sucking sound.” Seems to us that we’re all led to believe that we need all kinds of communication and entertainment plans that are neatly packaged for our benefit. Baloney! And it’s some very expensive baloney, too!
After many exhausting research hours and the resulting tussles with the wife, we put a stop to the research and focused on our use. What services do we really use? Now, that’s a question that made this “new problem” much easier to solve!
We use our cell phones at home and outside the house, and we were late to the game, but now we use texting. We use the internet at work (by necessity), at home (both for working at home, and also for leisure), and in hotspots (again, for work and leisure). And we use recorded shows on TV – but we don’t just turn the TV on and look at whatever’s there. We don’t log into the internet on our smartphones, we don’t watch much live TV like news shows and sports events, we don’t use the house phone much. People might find it strange, but since our cell minutes are free after 7pm, we use our house phone so little now that we sometimes forget to check messages there!
Once we know our actual use, we can settle on what services we want to pay for. We will continue our cell phone plan (without a contract now – but we have a cheap plan so why switch?). We are getting rid of our bundle of packaged home communications – no more home phone, cable TV and internet. (We never shelled out the money for premium channels anyway!) Going from the bundle to retaining only our cable internet connection will save us $700 in the next 12 months! We were already doing Netflix, but we decided to upgrade our account to include live streaming (at an extra cost of $36 for the year). With that, we can now even watch recorded TV shows just like we do now with our DVR, so it doesn’t even change our viewing habits very much.
Oh yes. We will also get the wife a new cell phone. But no new data plan, thank you very much! A plain vanilla phone with text capabilities will do – and wouldn’t you know it, vanilla happens to be her favorite flavor anyway!
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[...] from Money Beagle presents Is $18 Worth Being Less Aggravated?ctreit from Money Obedience presents Forget Needs and Wants. Focus on Use Instead! , and says, “Focus on use when you buy things to avoid waste.”ElizabethG (Modern Gal) [...]
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[...] A spouse, on the other hand, most likely cares how well we are keeping up with him or her. My wife and I recently needed new cell phones and we struggled a lot over which ones to get, but we only bought them when we decided together that we would buy gadgets that meet our needs rather than our wants. (Check out our post “Forget Needs and Wants. Focus on Use Instead!”) [...]
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