We pay well too much for 3 phones on Verizon. We started from $199/month and hopefully the price has dropped a little bit by now (to $179/month)? (I even do not know how much it costs us now.)
I think we should jump to other carrier/plan as soon as we could.
Verizon is our only option where we live. Sometimes even it is pretty sketchy.
Has anyone posted this article about SF yet? http://www.citylab.com/work/2016/04/millionaires-in-san-francisco-are-no-longer-considered-wealthy/478200/
No wonder I feel so “poor” when living in this area!
Annoyingly bad reporting. Does the reporter not know the difference between income and net worth?
I have a dumb flip-phone. I’m cheap, I don’t want to get addicted, I get mad at H’s smartphone, and … the biggest reason of all … I refuse to be at my employer’s beck & call at all times. Not getting email on my phone is a wonderful thing.
H and I have been diligent savers. To be honest, we worry that someday our retirement and savings accounts will be taxed to help pay for all our peers who spent rather than saved. I know it seems cynical, but …
My in-laws in my generation does not have a cell phone, dumb or smart. They manage with a landline. I think they take the cake in being slowest with changes.
If you do, does the monthly payment go down?
We have four off-contract phones on T-mobile and it costs about $100/mo for all four lines with unlimited data and text.
@Igloo. Yes, if you bring your own phone, then you only pay for the service monthly and don’t have to enter into a contract. Otherwise, you are financing the cost of the phone as part of your monthly payment and they typically require a contract (so you can’t just leave with the phone until it’s fully paid).
If you’re someone like me who keeps the same phone for years, it’s a lot more cost effective. And it makes it easier to switch providers and chase a better deal.
In the US, T-Mobile and AT&T use GSM, while Verizon and Sprint use CDMA. So, unless a phone has both GSM and CDMA capability, it can only be used on the subset of carriers (or the resellers/MVNOs of such) that match the phone.
You would think that. But the monthly bill does not go down after the contract term is over. I usually keep my phone more than 2 years. Is the bill lower only if you start out with your own phone?
The system is byzantine. I try to figure it out, for the sake of making rational divisions about cell service, and every attempt eludes me. Or perhaps brighter minds here can figure it out for me. For me it is an additional $40 per month, but then I have a corporate discount on each line, which makes it almost reasonable, except that the bill STILL is crazy high, after insurance is added, and data plans tacked on.
@Igloo, that may be the case. It’s been a long time since I’ve been locked into a contract. If I recall correctly, I was eligible to upgrade to a new phone, but the price remained the same. Contact your carrier. If they won’t adjust your plan, switch carriers. You can always go back under a different plan.
After about 7 years with ATT I switched to Sprint in March - 3 lines, 25 GB, $100 without new phone cost. Got about 325 per line from Costco and Sprint together (Costco coupons of 225 each yet to come).
Prof. Pollack did update his original index card to change savings rate from 20% to a range of 10-20%. Here is his explanation from an interview:
Q. You made a couple of tweaks to the original rules. One of them is to recommend saving 10% to 20% of your income rather than a flat 20%. Why the change?
A. I do think 20% is a good goal to aim for, and it’s appropriate for people like tenured professors at the University of Chicago who have income to save. But for a mass audience, putting in a range of 10% to 20% is more helpful—that’s something [my co-author] Helaine felt strongly about, and it makes sense. For someone like a low-income single mom trying to pay the bills, telling them to save 20% isn’t practical. It may be obvious, but the best way to make your saving happen is to automate it and gradually increase the amount. The idea is to have a sustainable savings plan that’s reasonable for you, and to be more conscious about your spending, so your money is going to what you need and really value—not on things you don’t care about.
My understanding is that the unlocked phones we bought at the Apple store are capable of being used with ANY US carrier. This is why we purchased there rather than anywhere else. We want the flexibility to be able to switch if we decide to. The prices were similar anyway and we don’t need any company to provide financing for us.
One only needs to look at the overwhelming reliance on student loans and other means of financial aid to see the deplorable condition of America’s receding-middle class. Given the increasing cost of living in certain regions of the nation (California and the Northeast, to name a few) and the absence of any nation-wide initiative to invest/ save funds for said-emergencies or other expenditures (i.e: college), it’s no wonder that this is occurring.
@DangerDan96 Well I’d have to disagree here, higher cost of living and reliance on student loans isn’t really reducing the middle class but probably the purchasing power of the middle class after inflation is taken into account. 50% of Americans are middle class and it is defined as those earning around $25,000-$75,000 in household income.
It only takes $130,000 in a 3 person household to be considered among the top 20% of income earners in the country which most people wouldn’t really consider rich. I feel this rhetoric is what is encouraging a form of socialist agenda to magically redistribute income but I’d like to voice my opinion on this issue.
I’m a dual US-UK citizen and I can tell you that in the UK we have all from of socialist policies, from social housing to social healthcare to state run education. Despite all these policies in place the income inequality in the UK is just as high as that of the united states. Wealth disparity is almost as high as that of the united states as well.
There is no magic solution to income inequality especially in large states such as the UK with 65 million individuals and the US with a population of 300 million. Small rich states like Norway, Sweden and Denmark may have been able to majorly reduce income inequality but these states have the highest tax rates in the world and the highest cost of living in the world.
There is no big government utopia and actually tax rates in the US are similar to those in the UK, the US actually has one of the most progressive tax systems in the world yet these disparities keep growing. The top tax rate in the UK is 45% and in the US it’s 40%(39.6%) hardly that much of a difference in fact the top tax rate was 40% in the UK until 2010.
The income tax rates Americans actually pay are a lot lower than the income tax rates stated in the 1040 instructions.
@Ali1302, the following tax rates are overstated because not all income is taxed. Also, The top .1 pays income tax rates lower than the top 1 percent. That info is from information from prior years.
Anyway…
http://taxfoundation.org/article/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2015-update