Real Cost

Anything that you pay for has an advertised cost and a real cost. The real cost is often invisible due to marketing plans, or the difficulty of seeing cost versus usage. In this post I would like to discuss one of the real costs in my life and how they compare to the advertised cost.

Everyone has a cell phone these days. There are thousands of phones and an even greater array of calling and data plans. I am a very basic user when it comes to wireless services. I do not text, and I do not surf. Thus I need only calling minutes. The plan we decided to go with is a pay as you go $.075 per minute. This seems pretty good: 300 minutes for $20. When I began to investigate our actual usage and what we were being charged for I found that a majority of our calls were far short of a whole minute. We were however being charged in rounded up full minutes even for calls that ended exactly on a whole minute. See the data below.



In the first chart you can see that every call that was made resulted in an overcharge for minutes. This resulted in the real rate per minute being slightly higher than the advertised rate on average. On very short calls the real rate was extremely high.

The real cost of our cell phone service comes out as $.088 per minute (20% more than the advertised price)

Unfortunately unless you live in Peru (one of the only places I can find that charges by the second for airtime) you are stuck with the roundup policy. The only real result of this analysis for me is a new tendency to not call anyone if I am not sure of getting through. Also if I think the conversation will take less than one minute I send an e-mail instead. Overall I am now using fewer minutes, and spending less

Paying Bills

I have already covered reducing time paying bills in another post (Family Values) and thought that I would share the next steps that I have taken. After a little research I discovered that the satellite and phone bill including internet can be set up for auto pay using a credit card. Sounds scary I know. By following up with setting the credit card bill to auto pay itself in full from our checking account each month, I can make sure everything is paid on time while at the same time earning rewards points that quickly add up to more purchasing power without me ever having to think about the bills. With paperless statements added in, I can let all of those companies digitally archive my statements and also avoid having to file them. Also it is very simple and fast to access them online at a planned date once per month to check for accuracy. We now have only three bills that require action each month and they are set up for bill pay. Total time now required is four minutes per month.