Money Poll #16: Telecommunications Spending
Tip It!After a monthlong break, it’s time for another Money Poll. The question of the week this time is: “How much do you spend on telecommunications each month?” When I ask this, I’m talking about your landline, cell phone, internet access, and cable/satellite TV before taxes. As usual, I’ll go first…
Phone: $25.00
Cell Phone: $42.00 (Two phones after 30% in discounts from Sprint PCS)
DSL Connection: $32.95
Dish Network: $55.98 (even though the customer service sucks!)
Total: $155.93
A few comments… First of all, the above values total to more than $1,800 when viewed across a year. That’s quite a bit of money, but we’re okay with that, as we like what we get in return.
Cell phones are far from a necessity, but they’re a convenience that we’re willing to pay for. And while we could probably get away without a landline, that’s not something we’re comfortable dropping at this point — and we’d end up with internet problems if we did, as we’re not willing to drop our broadband connection, and we can’t get cable at our house. Thus, a phone line is something of a necessary evil. As far as Dish Network goes, we could scale back a bit in terms of our service plan (or even cut out TV entirely), but we like the service (if not the customer service) that we’re getting…
Like I said above, we could save a decent amount of money in this area if we wanted to, but it’s not really worth it to us at this point. And with that, I’ll turn it over to you…
Published on July 17th, 2006 - 8 Comments
Filed under: Polls
About the author: Nickel is the founder and editor-in-chief of this site. He's a thirty-something family man who has been writing about personal finance since 2005, and guess what? He's on Twitter!
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July 17th, 2006 at 9:48 am
Two cell phones: $50-$60/mo (a bit higher these past few months as I had to make a few international calls and some roaming calls)
Internet: $43/mo
No land line, no cable television bills.
July 17th, 2006 at 5:17 pm
It is interesting to me that so far the largest percentages fall into the $81-$100 and over $200 categories. I can understand the over $200 when you have cable, cell phones and dsl. But I am curious why so many fall into the other category.
July 17th, 2006 at 7:03 pm
It might be good to distinguish answering for a household, family, or individual. I put my individual expenditure (60-80), but I have 2 other roommates who cut the cable/internet with me. And obviously, I think many people answered as couples…
Good idea for a pole, though!
July 18th, 2006 at 8:32 am
Many people get cell phones provided by their job, or else they would add 1 or two of those to the mix. Figure $50 per, and you get over $200/ month.
July 18th, 2006 at 6:32 pm
Two cell phones-one’s a Blackberry (Tmobile), basic cable and cable modem (Comcast)= $200 a month. We don’t need a land line and we don’t want a million tv channels.
July 20th, 2006 at 11:02 am
If you aren’t using the cell phones a lot, you may want to look into Tracfone.
Most “prepaid” plans aren’t much better than regular cell-phone service. But tracfone tends to be a genuine deal.
Figure out what the tracfone would cost you over a year (because the best value involves the double minute/1year service card), and compare that to your cell bill now.
If you can live with cell phones that are just phones (no cameras or pda’s or other fancy gadgets, just a cheap $20 to $50 phone.) trackfone may be a better deal.
July 25th, 2006 at 6:39 pm
Cell phone (Virgin Mobile prepaid): $5
Landline (SunRocket): $17
Satellite (DirecTV with TiVo): $50
Comcast Business Internet: $160
(I do get $50 a month from people for whom I host Web sites, so it’s a net of $110 for Internet.) So, $182.
The Internet connection is admittedly a luxury. I could easily get by with their 6/768 connection rather than their 10/1 service, which would save me a good $60 a month. Or I could host the sites somewhere else and drop down to consumer-grade Internet and save even more. But I like it the way it is, and it’s one of the few things I really splurge on.
July 3rd, 2007 at 9:04 am
In the UK companies are starting to lump together packages ie. mobile, tv, landline and internet all from the same service provider. It cuts down the cost on heck of a lot and is worth finding out about in your area.