<p>I do not miss the landline at all.
No more junk phone calls. One less ugly wire to my house. ( actually two because at one point we had two lines)
We also don’t have cable,
Our cell bill is the biggest - about $200 for 3 iphones & a flipphone, we get a20%discount w Verizon through Hs employer.
Internet is $25, inc taxes.</p>
<p>fendergirl-
yes, we are ‘supposed’ to get a bundle discount for our verizon landline, DSL and Directv.
(according to Directv reps).
But when I call Verizon, or go online, they insist that I must upgrade from copper to Fios to get the bundle discount. I’m not interested in getting a Fios triple play since I probably want to kill the landline. I’d have to spend more to ‘save’!!!</p>
<p>We are down to three cell phones (all dumb) in our family after DS graduated to his own iphone plan last year. We never come close to using our small amount of minutes (300?) since so many we use are Verizon to Verizon, or nights and weekends, etc.
Total for all three is $92 ish. We are pretty old school and I’m definitely frugal!</p>
<p>We got D an iphone, so we figured that we should also replace an old flip phone with an iphone too, since we needed to upgrade the plan anyway. We are in the process of porting our landline number to the new iphone and using a bluetooth telephone when that cell phone is in the house. That way, we’re hoping, nothing will really change regarding our communicating, but we are hoping we’ll save about $30 without the landline. Of course we are paying that much more for the new iphone’s data plan, so we’re not really saving anything. It’s just spread out more.</p>
<p>We just checked into dropping our landline since we can add another cell phone to our plan now. We have DSL so we have to have SOME kind of “landline” to run the service. For us to do that it would save us $5/month. We kept the landline. The best thing you can do is get another cable company into your town. With the monoploy these companies have on areas they can charge what they want. We had 2 cable companies in our old town and our cable, internet and phone through them was $70/month. We are paying $150/month for the same thing in our new town. I could drop the tv but everyone else here watches tv :D.</p>
<p>We had this discussion on New Years Eve. Honestly, with as much “tv” as we watch, we are heading towards an antenna. We have Charter for basic TV only. Their phone service is so unreliable (ditto Comcast) that I won’t go for that. We have friends who have been without landline phone service for weeks. Somewhat if it’s “free”…not worth more if you lose it often.</p>
<p>It’s the cell phones that are the money suckers. I so wish the U.S. would use the same model as mobile phones everywhere else in the world. Only charge the person making the call, and have phone data/minutes available at every corner.</p>
<p>probably cheaper to keep the landline and cut cell phone usage. It amazes me what some people spend monthly to use a cell phone.</p>
<p>We don’t have Cable TV. Hulu, YouTube, Crackle, ESPN - they have live sports for free with our internet service) provide more than enough stuff to watch. We also have an antenna though I don’t watch broadcast TV.</p>
<p>We still have our landline. I’d like to get it on one of our cell phones or get it hooked up to Google Voice but I don’t know if I can do that. Cell Phones: my iPhone is $80/month. Son’s phone is $100/year but he pays for that. Wife and daughter have phones that cost $100/year each. My iPhone is expensive because I have the 5 GB plan so that I can use it as a wireless hotspot. This allows me to work remotely with my laptop. I actually only use about 300 MB of cell data (which would cost me about $35 less) but AT&T requires the 5 GB plan for hotspot. It gives me great work flexibility which I will need in the first half of this year. I can drop back down to a lesser service later on and turn it on when I need it.</p>
<p>Cell phones are definitely worth the expense. Especially with having a teenager in the house. I can reach her whenever I want/no matter where she is! Via text/voice. Landlines are funny, they don’t work outside the house so well! :)</p>
<p>I converted my land line to VOIP a few years ago and to cell last year with Verizon Wireless. It costs $10/month. I like this option because I was able to keep my land line phone number, which I have had for 20 something years, and I’m still able to have handsets all over the house.</p>
<p>Chiming in on this thread because I’m trying to cut all these bills too. I don’t want to give up the landline - it’s the only thing that works when there are power outages and even cell service is spotty then. Right now I have satellite tv and dsl, so I need to keep the landline anyway. I never had pay-tv, until they switched from analog to digital. Once they switched, I could only get reception in the upstairs, but with a good antenna, I should be able to improve that.
Other than that, I could give up the smartphone too, but I’ve really come to rely on it!</p>
<p>I can’t seem to get up enough nerve to drop my landline. Very few calls in, and most social calls I make through the smartphone. Investigated StraightTalk and Magic Jack, but both seem to have inconvenient limitations.</p>
<p>As for TV, I haven’t had cable in two years and had been without it for years beforehand until they called me to offer a deal with a substantial discount. Presently I’m getting along with an antenna, though like others I miss the cable news shows (and TCM, AMC as well as NCAA basketball). But there are news broadcasts available online, particularly the MSNBC shows. And you can watch the PBS News Hour same-day broadcasts online. Yeah, I miss CNN and Fox News Sunday roundtable discussion, but some of those can be heard on the old fashioned radio. And I can follow news on my Android Tablet.</p>
<p>I Discovered ‘Downton Abbey’ and ‘Hell on Wheels’ through Netflix on my Tablet account. By the way, you would be surprised at the ample availability of recent and inexpensive DVD movies and TV shows in discount bins at BestBuy, Target and others. All in all, there are several ways to live without the expense of cable tv and ways to reduce your phone costs.</p>
<p>
I check out DVDs for free at the public library.</p>
<p>Good point Hunt, but for 5 bucks spent at Target I get a wider selection and don’t have to wait for an ‘on loan’ DVD to be returned to the library. But a co-worker who is a movie buff has been extolling the virtues of his local library’s DVD collection for years.</p>
<p>Boy, we are right in the middle of this too. Lots of good ideas above.</p>
<p>We have one Virgin Mobile smart phone for $35/month, for the student. The other two family phones are ‘dumb’ at $20 for 3 months each. We still have the land line. Currently we have DSL. I really don’t want to get rid of the land line in case of emergency. H just bought the Virgin mobile hot spot for $35/month, limited 3G, unlimited 4G. So if you are in a 4G zone, that’s an option for faster internet. However, he takes this thing to work everyday, as his employer has cheap internet and he needs better for his work. LOL. But he’s thinking of using this option for our home internet instead of the DSL, which is slower.</p>
<p>Now as for cable… We are just about ready to ditch it. It’s now around $100/mo. H watches shows and thinks he’d be happier with Hulu or something similar. I watch the live news and sports, so I’ll loose much of what I watch. We’ve had the OTA antenna hooked up for quite some time, and that works well most of the time, but broadcast TV is limited. The full HD OTA images are great, though.</p>
<p>My dad does not have cable and relies on the antenna and netflix. The Notre Dame/Alabama game is this coming Monday on ESPN. (The vast majority of sports are on ESPN via cable TV or dish TV, period). He would really like to watch it. We just figured out that we could install the Watch Espn App onto his iPad, then log onto my cable TV account, and he could watch espn sports on the iPad. Now I will go get an ipad A/V adapter and HDMI cable and hook the iPad up to his TV. Should work, and he should be able to watch the game in the comfort of his own home.</p>
<p>Virgin mobile sounds like a deal! With $35 per month for a smart phone. Really? My bill is a major drain, AT&T, covering the kids. For someone that doesn’t talk with anyone at length very often, words have become expensive. I need my landline, as cell service in the house is not reliable. No cable, just DSL service for internet, land and 4 phone lines. S got an I phone, and that seems to have added far more expense than anticipated.</p>
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<p>I haven’t had a TV for years and rarely turned it on in the previous decade. I actually watch far more TV shows now than anytime in the last 10 years, but I watch them on one of my computers, usually sans commercials. I simply cannot sit through commercial television any more, the constant commercial interruptions just drive me crazy, as does the fact I cannot pause a show in progress.</p>
<p>Old cell phone: 10 cents per minute, maybe $100 every 9 months.
Uverse Internet and National Long Distance: $60/month
That’s it.</p>
<p>At our home we don’t have cable TV, or regular landline phone service. Everyone has their own cell phone. We do have cable high speed internet with wireless router ($50/mo.), Magicjack phone service hooked to internet ($3/mo.), Roku for TV ($0/mo.), Netflix ($8/mo.), OTA HD TV hooked up to big antenna on roof ($0/mo.)…total $61/mo. We also have hooked to our big TV via HDMI cable a computer which enables us to watch live coverage like CNN and all the ESPN channels with my sister’s password for the cable TV service she has at her apartment away at her college ($0/mo.) We don’t watch as much TV as we could but we have access to all we need. For news I like to watch podcasts such as NBC and MSNBC which allows me to kinda make my own news show when I want. I hate watching CNN with its million commercials. I really don’t watch too much TV anyway.</p>
<p>The Roku has about 1000 channels, most are free not requiring paid subscription. <a href=“http://www.catastrophegirl.com/rokuchannelcount.htm[/url]”>http://www.catastrophegirl.com/rokuchannelcount.htm</a></p>
<p>For those of you that still have kids in college: students can get Amazon Prime for free for 6 months (great for getting textbooks quickly), and Amazon Prime comes with a large selection of free movies and TV shows – just use their account to log in.</p>
<p>Well, the iPad → TV via the iPad A/V adaptor + HDMI cable works well. Logging on to my Comcst acct allows them access to ESPN live, plus a bunch of On Demand shows. Now the challenge is to figure out what additional content this iPad hookup allows. I just poked around the CSPAN site. Huge video library, and it looks like they allow live streaming via an app. I looove BookTV - maybe I can still watch it even if we ditch the cable.</p>
<p>H acquired an Apple TV today.</p>