Frugal Living - April 2017

Here is my April edition of money saving tips.  Subject matter - my road to recovery from 10+ years of cell phone contracts!

I've been an AT&T subscriber for more than 10 years.  I can't remember what my bills were in the beginning but I know they got more expensive once my husband and I got hooked on iPhones.  My first iPhone was a 3GS 8gb.  I adored that phone until the space got so small that it couldn't accommodate email, photos, upgrades and everything else I wanted so I upgraded to the iPhone 4 with 16gb and stayed happy with that until 2 years ago when the same problem occurred.

A very helpful man called me over at Target and made a very compelling case on how we should upgrade to the iPhone 5.  I guess he caught me right when my contract was about to end because the bill came out to only slightly more than what I was already paying, approximately $130 per month for two phones.

The new plans 2 years ago were showing that we would have paid considerably more per month on the iPhone 6 so I thought we were getting a great deal on the 5's. I realize now how sadly naive I was.  Here is how it breaks down:

We paid $130 per month for 2gb of data total.  This past month our contract ended on April 17th.  Our bill would have gone down to $84 if we had stayed with AT&T.  Subtract $130 - 84 = 46.  Take 46 x 24 months and the total is $1,104.  We paid $1,104 for two iPhone 5's.  Excuse me while I curl into a ball and cry myself to sleep.  But wait, I don't have time for self-pity, I firmly believe that we must be constantly trying to make ourselves better at everything so I will take this as a wake up lesson that I finally managed to learn!  

Even before I did the math, I was already feeling uncomfortable with 2 year contracts so I started looking into other plans a month ago and promptly ran out of time due to travel and illnesses so I decided to start with Cricket who was offering $70 p/m with 3gb data each for two phones that we brought into the store .  There is no contract so if we find a better deal elsewhere, we can walk away at any time.  I did later find that GoPro is offering $50 for two phones at 2gb each and Freedom Pop has a similar deal so maybe I'll try them later.

I went on eBay a few weeks ago and bought an iPhone 6 with 128gb of space for $255 because I was once again running out of room for email, photos, upgrades, etc.  My husband decided to stick with his iPhone 5 because he was not running out of space.  I can honestly say the difference between 5 and 6 is very little in terms of how fast apps run or operate so for me it was simply a choice of more space that was the critical factor.

Lessons learned:

• buy phones online after scouting the best deal
• no more phone contracts - EVER!