I'm still happy with my HSA.

I have a sweatshirt from 1988 that I'm trying to get a grease stain out of. It's a Michigan State Rose bowl sweatshirt that I would not have bought new, probably got it at a garage sale. I don't care about the logo just got grease on it from the electric gokart chain. I put a guard on it now. You can see the kart at:

That thing really rips! But I wouldn't drive it in shorts, if you take a spill that would result in some serious road rash.

Get one. Shovel shit, if necessary.

I don't believe you. Not everyone has a cell phone, particularly those looking for entry level jobs.

No, handouts are what charities do. ...and they're far better at it than the government.

Disagree. A "bad situation" isn't the company's problem. They need to be paid and do anything to make sure that happens. If that means the permanent loss of a customer, so be it. That's the calculation they should be concerned with. They aren't charities.

I'd rather they waived all federal employment taxes than the downright waste of $1T we're seeing now. Declare a moratorium (or just end them) on capital gains taxes, while you're at it.

How 'Christian' of you. You should try to get 'ANY' type of phone service with no job and a bad credit rating. I know people who work full time who can't get a cell phone in their name, and can't keep a job without one. If you have an unpaid hospital bill, they won't even talk to you so the service has to be in someone else's name, if they can get someone to take the risk.

You brag about helping people get to their doctors. Don't other people deserve the ability to call their doctor? As far as 'an expired/unregistered/whatever' cell phones allowing you to call 911, it has to have been in service. It also doesn't have any information about the caller, so unless you are able to answer a lot of questions, it's useless.

The 'free' cell phones don't get many minutes, and they are older, refurbished phones pulled from the recycling streams.

Nah. For some reason I have no problem getting consulting assignments without ever using my cell phone number. Because the cell phone is off except on biz trips, and then I sometimes give clients the number so we can be in touch. In mountainous areas it doesn't work any other way because of lots of radio drop-outs.

Interesting to see how, for example, Missouri seems to have totally screwed up while Alabama is doing fine. Almost a digital divide right at the state line. Same between Oregon and Idaho or California and Nevada (that one doesn't really surprise me though). Some lessons ought to be learned from information like this. And some folks should figure out why Idaho, Wyoming and Nebraska are doing so well.

Now we are getting somewhere :-)

But you can bet that certain people "up there" will cling to every last dime in taxes. IOW it probably won't fly :-(

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Exactly. I'm thinking along those lines for myself. I'll "never" (I did once when I was interviewing) use my current allocation (750 min/mo) and that wouldn't cost me more than the $60ish I pay now. ...and it would have saved me a bundle the one month I did run over. The problem is the other half; prepaid time is no longer "free".

I might get one just to try it out. It's not like a lot of money for an experiment.

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They pissed me off over this one. What good is tech support if they're incompetent? Yes, they're easily reached, but they troubleshoot with a shotgun.

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This isn't at all unusual. Many think they're owed "Air Jordans", or some such.

I wear a corduroy jacket I bought in the spring, three years ago, for $10. OTOH, I have a nice lined wool trench coat in the closet that I no longer have any use for. I'll likely never see -20F again. ;-)

They still take "good-condition" used stuff here.

OTOH, I don't so much mind the "new toys only" rules for Toys-for-Tots (or equivalent). My employer also has a bicycle donation program each Christmas. They collect new bicycles from employees (a few suppliers give too) and give them to one of the Christian children's missions here.

Then tell them this: Go to Walmart, buy a cheap pay-go phone, buy a $20 or whatever airtime card, unpack card, activate, done. This is similar to what I have. No credit checks, nothing, you get to use only the minutes you have prepaid so there is no incentive for a company to check you credit. What for? What on earth is so difficult about that?

You can call the doctor from home. You can get a landline phone with some minutes (AFAIR 30/month in this area) for next to nothing, paid for by an extra tax we pay with our phone bill every month. 30 minutes is enough to call the doctor, don't you think?

What's wrong with old? My cell phone is older than most of those, probably around four years now. For some reason it is still good enough for me.

If you have a medical emergency while on the road you are _not_ supposed to call your doctor, you are supposed to call 911. The free cell phones can call 911.

Won't Gunk Hand Soap work for that? ...Jim Thompson

Road rash and LA batteries. What a combination.

At least some prepaid companies advertise that they don't check credit. Why would they need to? The customer pays everything up-front; there is no credit involved.

No it doesn't have to be in service. Federal law requires them to take a 911 call from *any* cell phone.

Sounds like they're really prepaid.

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Draw up a coarse cell budget with scenario A and scenario B. The last line item on scenario B would be called "Savings to be used to take sweetheart to nice restaurants: $XXX". That ought to do it :-)

Don't wait, just do it. It works fine. Many people "think about it" after I tell them and then never do it, essentially wasting $40-$50 every month. Sometimes it's contracts, although one guy chose to just plunk down the $200 in penalties and cut the rope. Still a much better deal than the >$1000 he'd have paid until the end of the contract. IOW with his usual calling pattern and the new pay-go phone he will have clocked in net savings well over $650 by the time his old contract would have been up. Enough for a dozen dinner dates with his wife.

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You have to be pretty persistent in getting your case escalated, ask for supervisors etc. Done it a few times. Telco lingo helps a lot. "The line current is 3.2 milliamps short and the signal level by 3.5 decibels" ... "Ahm, well, ahem, you will be called back about this". 10 minutes later the phone rang and now I had an older guy on the line who really knew his stuff.

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Same here. I've lived in Europe before and it doesn't get quite that cold here in CA. Well, let's say not yet.

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Money for a night out isn't an issue. If I wanted to save money I'd attack the satellite TV bill.

Our contract expired last August. Our phones still work fine, so why get new phones that are no better than the old?

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THe line guy said we were "marginal", or worse, for the service that we had ("DSL ultra", or some such) but that downgrading to 768K would fix the problem. Nope. It didn't fix the broken modem at all. ...but we're now stuck with downgraded service.

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;-)

Yeah, but it's quite special if you take the real savings, in cash, and put them into a glass piggybank. Feels like free lunches and dinners :-)

I'd ditch satellite. We have terrestrial TV. It's the pits since this dreaded DTV came along but we found one east coast based station (THIS-TV) that runs tons of old movies. Half of the time the DTV signal pixelates out like usual or they have the start times wrong but it has brought us nice westerns and such. Old stuff that you can't find elsewhere.

In the US that's a problem. Phones are generally married to the carrier. But there are some great RF parts in there. Or donate them. I paid $40 for my Nokia years ago and got credited $40 worth of airtime. Pretty cool.

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Call them a few times, they can uncap it or at least get you to 1.2M. I found that sometimes it requires several attempts until you get a person that's willing to work with you.

I never got into that. The money in the jar is far less than what I generally carry in my wallet. It doesn't make much of a difference in the grand scheme.

I would, but I'd have to find a new cook and bed warmer, too. ;-)

Oh, I didn't mean it like that. I meant that I saw no reason to renew my contract, just to get a new phone that was no better than the old. I renewed last time only because the battery in my wife's died for the second time.

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The problem is that tech support turns it over to the local installers to do the work. They may or may not get it done, but I'll get charged either way. I was supposed to have 3Mb, but anything over 768K costs more. Maybe I'll call back in a while (after they've forgotten the this go-round ;).

It's all in the perception. Say you went from that $60/mo plan to pay-go and then after half a year you'd have $300 in there. It just feels differently than simply withdrawing that from an ATM.

Oh, now I understand, don't want that to happen ...

A lot of folks around here have subscribed to Netflix instead of movie channels.

Even then it may not make sense. Getting into a contract that binds you for 1-2 years and effectively puts a lien on your wallet for $1k or more just to avoid $20-30 at Batteries Plus?

I think uncapping or increasing BW is done centrally. The service techs only come out when some hardware is broken or a line problem develops.

Like I said,...

We have NetFlix, too (basic one-movie plan). The movie channels really are superfluous. I should dump them. Other "cable" channels get watched a lot.

The escape clause was $150. Amazingly, a phone, without the subsidy, costs almost exactly the same amount. ;-) At the time, I didn't know of any reasonable pay-go alternatives. Trac-phone didn't qualify.

It may be done centrally but a work order has to be cut and go from one set of hands to another, likely through bookkeeping. AFAICT, they can't just see what she'll do and bill accordingly.

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Those have only been availible for a few years, and in some areas the service is quite poor. I know people who service electronics in a large part of Florida, and the prepaid phones were useless. One is a freelace broadcast engineer. Since the AM radio towers are in out of the way places, coverage was very poor. He had to get one of the radio sations to sign the contract with a carrier that had coverage in every city he had work.

I've been told that unless the phone has been activated for use in a paid service, it won't work for 911. IOW, until the serial number is in a database somewhere, that phone doesn't exist. That's why they collect used phones to give to battered women, instead of accepting those cheap prepaid phones that have not been activated.