Is your cell phone dragging you down?

[devilc]

I see this so often where I work and amongst my friends -- people who struggle to make ends meet and yet the majority of them have a smartphone (with a dataplan).

A friend of mine who has 2 part time jobs and no health insurance recently had a medical emergency that landed her in the hospital for two days and she's dreading that bill. But, she's got a Samsung Galaxy SIII and a phone bill of over $100/month for it.

If you want to free up some money, ask yourself, is that smartphone a want or a need?

1) Is your phone your sole source of Internet connectivity? (Did you ditch your previous ISP when you got this phone? Or is this the first time you've had your own Internet connectivity?)
2) Do your job's work duties require you to have a smart phone? (And if so, is there a way to get your employer -- if you're not a temp or a freelancer -- to pay for it or subsidize it?)

If you said "no" to either of those, then, sorry, it's a want. There was life before Twitter, Facebook, etc.

It might not be cool, but a pay as you go feature phone with a plan that lets you call and text really is all you need, and many of these can be had for out of pocket cash of under $75, with calling plans of about $15/mo.

If what you really use your smartphone for is entertainment while standing in line or while in transit? Get an iPod Touch or a small tablet and load it up with books, music, videos, and games. It will pay for itself in 4 months, tops.

And the extra $50-75 of cash you can throw at bills or put into your eFund is a very good thing.

Comments

[jenett]

I'm inclined to say that there's different kinds of need. (I'm paying about $85 a month for limited texting, unlimited data - I snuck in before Verizon discontinued the plan - and very mild phone minutes, most of which I don't usually use.) But it's worth it to me to pay the extra $40ish a month over what it'd be without a smart phone because:

1) I live in rural Maine: we don't have a wide choice of providers anyway (which means, I couldn't go for several of the cheapest or pay-as-you go options - they just don't have adequate reliable coverage. So the price difference is more like $25-40, not closer to $100.)

2) I live in rural Maine and use my phone as a GPS device when going anywhere unfamiliar. (Saves me getting lost, gives me lots of options if I get turned around, does not require me to update maps.) But that requires data plan.

3) I'm an IT Librarian, and while it's not *entirely* my job to have a smart phone, I both do periodic classes on it, and talk about interesting apps/etc. as part of blog posts/etc. (Not so much specific "Use this app" but the "Hey, did you know some phones can do X?") and also some testing of specific library database apps, etc.

4) I live in rural Maine, and while there's a fair number of places with free wifi, many of the most reliable to find either have limited hours or are, y'know, McDonalds. I'd rather be certain I have access if I end up having to punt (due to weather, etc.) while somewhere else in the state. (Either to find a place to eat, or find my way home, or whatever.)

Related: I do *just* enough travelling that having portable 'Net has been a massive saver of energy and spoons pretty much every time I travel. (Yay, chronic medical stuff), or times when "find a wifi spot in an unfamiliar place" was just one thing too many.

5) I have a very good friend with hearing impairment: she lipreads. We mostly manage phone okay (and do a lot of our communication by IM and email and such), but it has been a big reassurance to know that if something happened to her, or to me, and we really need to talk and she's not managing voice, that we could FaceTime and she could lipread as a backup.

(It did not quite come to this, but we came close when I called her from the emergency vet an hour away from home when my previous cat was being put down. Those are the kinds of time one really needs one's best friend, and I was nowhere near a known wifi point.)

6) I use it for multiple things I'd otherwise be spending money on - for example, I use it as a pedometer, but the app I use works on both the accelerometer (which the iTouch would have) but also a GPS position, which it doesn't.

7) Related to the chronic health stuff: having *one* device to manage (that is everything from alarm clock to pedometer to to-do list to phone to web browser if I need it to music listening) turns out to be a huge amount easier on me day to day than a phone and something else. (I did non-smart phone and iTouch for about two years, 2-4 years ago, and it was - it worked, but it was severely suboptimal in terms of my remembering both of them or charging both of them, sometimes. And on a practical matter, my phone is always in my pocket or on my desk, and carrying two things rather than one would be noticeably heavier.)

Most of these certainly don't apply to anyone else here (though hi, if you're also in rural Maine, feel free to PM and see if we're anywhere near each other!) but they're good enough reasons for me to spend more each month and manage my budget in other ways as a trade-off, especially given a relatively small amount of $$ difference in my case. (I'd be a lot more motivated to find alternate solutions if my bill or the difference were three figures, not two, is what I'm saying there.)

[devilc]

I think you've done an excellent job of showing how, in your case, it's a need.