This article just popped up on my home page, regarding SF and its high cost of living:
This is related to your link.
http://www.businessinsider.com/san-franciscos-top-5-of-earners-are-insanely-rich-2015-3
We switched out cell to T-Mobile. The bill is now down to $100 for 4 lines plus tax! Our Sprint bill was more than 2x that and Verizon was higher with no data!
" When employees need to fund more and more of their own retirement, their own health insurance, and working jobs that have not kept up with COL, saving 20% per year is getting to be pie in the sky."
^ I see this every day. The company where I work offers no pension and no 401K matching. Employees’ health insurance premiums used to be fully paid, but now the company only contributes x dollars a month. My out of pocket cost for health insurance premiums for an HSA plan with a high deductible exceeds 12K annually. And COL increases - what are those? I honestly don’t know how many of our support staff personnel, especially the single moms with kids, survive. Most can’t even afford to contribute to their 401k, much less save another 20%.
Will the IRS negotiate an installment payment plan with you if you have enough cash in the bank to pay the tax? This is still the part of Gabler’s story that seems the most imprudent to me.
Am I the only American left without a smart phone of some kind?
So waiting for the day when I can do T Mobile! Getting through this last round of 2 year payoffs for all the phones, now that all of us have good enough phones. Then they are on their own, tho they pay every month.
Doschicos, perhaps. I had to think long and hard. But don’t you want to keep up with CC every 15 minutes? I then went for it, and am an addict like the rest. I didn’t let one D get one for a time, as she was not making enough to pay me back. Grad school? She needed it to be up to the minute on assignments and so on. Though even AT&T has Go phones that function as semi smart phones.
My mother and my mother-in-law don’t have them. They’re both 88.
Am I the only American left who does not do online banking (esp., using a smartphone)?
We started to switch from flip phones to smartphones about 3 years ago.
The main use of my smartphone: browse the CC site without any particular purpose most of time 
My wife’s main use: take pictures and post the pictures on her favorite who-knows-what-site-it-is (Actually several ones, one is Facebook. She spends a lot of time on maintaining her “blog” everyday.)
We switched from t-mobile to Verizon. Hate the price of the latter, but the former had no coverage in all the places we spend most of our vacations.
^ Ha… We did exactly the same thing!
Do not know when we will switch out of Verizon again (maybe when DS has his own plan?!)
We didn’t get smartphones until H retired, 12/31/2012. We have loved having them since. I was sucked into getting a “free” iPhone with Sprint one year and we were on that plan for over 2 years. The monthly bills were $225 apiece. After the contract ended, we switched to phones we purchased outright and then moved to TMobile. Yes, the coverage isn’t as good as it was when we had Verizon, but it works well enough for us, since we are mainly in big cities with decent coverage, including when we travel. I don’t have to be reached 24/7 while traveling anyway.
S made sure to buy our iphones at the Apple store so they can be used with ANY carrier and were unlocked. We aren’t positive how long we will stay with TMobile but have been with them for over a year now and no one has complained much. We also bought OnePlus One phones and H has a Nokia Windows phone. All work OK with TMobile.
@Hunt I guess I’m acting like an 88 year old. 
Honestly, one reason I haven’t yet (besides being frugal) is I am worried about addiction. I already spend too much time online as it is. I don’t necessarily want to make that addiction portable.
I did finally get on the online banking bandwagon about 2 years ago and am a convert. I didn’t even reorder checks when I ran out 4 months ago. So, you can teach old dogs new tricks.
I prefer using a laptop for looking at CC, facebook, and other things. I don’t even like ipads or other tablets.
I also have sucky cell reception around me for anything other than Verizon. If you are no longer under a contract and prefer Verizon, check out PagePlus. It uses the Verizon network and is much, much cheaper.
BTW, as Americans we get screwed on cell phone access. It is much cheaper in other countries and none of this locked cell phone crap.
H and Ds all have smartphones. I have a dumbphone. It’s mainly for emergencies but occasionally I use it to send text messages or to make calls while walking the dog. Oh, and it’s also my alarm clock.
DS1 got a smart phone less than a year ago. His work pays $60/month toward his expense, and he really needed one in order to be effective in his job.
I switched from T-Mobile to Verizon (before T-Mobile had iPhones), then to AT&T because it’s the only carrier that has any coverage at D’s school. I really dislike AT&T and I get lousy coverage in my area, but it was cheaper to tack D’s plan onto mine than to separate the two phones. One nice thing seems to be the shift away from contracts locked into phones. We did the “bring your own phone” plan when we switched.
I love it when it is only here we could freely jump from the topic about “the shame of middle class Americans” to the topic about smartphone, with a detour on the online banking, in a seemingly “smooth” transition. LOL.
Hey…they are related. Who does not feel a pain when they need to pay the hefty bill (in the standard of the middle class) to the cell phone carrier month after month?!
I only have a dumb flip phone. Time before last when it quit working, the verizon folks tried to tell me they didn’t even have dumb phones anymore and I had to take a smart phone as my replacement phone. I kept saying no and eventually they went in the back and found me one. They weren’t very gracious about it. Last time, about six months ago, when I sent my phone accidentally through the laundry, they had a whole display of dumb flip phones for me to choose from. So I think we aren’t the only ones.
I don’t have a landline. I use the dumb phone a whole lot. I don’t ever text.
About $100 a month for grandfathered family plan. $132 with fees and taxes and overseas call package of some kind. Kids have fancy smart phones given to them and paid for by their employers, but they like to keep a dumb phone for when their jobs disappear along with that phone option. I think they use the family plan phones for most of their personal calls. They definitely text on those phones.
And how! We always get a pair of cheap flip phones, with minutes loaded, as almost our first travel stop. We don’t even bother keeping them from one trip to the next any more. Maybe $25 per phone, with the minutes, for three months use, and we aren’t trying to be budgeting with the time we spend on them.
We each have a moto g smartphone bought at Target ($100 each). We use Consumer Cellular (ATT network). We pay $45 month total approx. for both phones. No contract and you can add and subtract minutes/texts/data as you go. No land line.