Creativity vs Interpretation

I am not sure what you mean by "do not pay for DATA", so I assume (until corrected) that you are referring to materials that you access from a web site, rather than keeping available in your own home such as books and DVDs.  My solution to that has been that if I purchase an online course, I download ALL the materials.  Usually, such sites will have PDFs available for download, but you are expected to stream the video when you want to work with it.  I have software that can download most anything, so I always download the video material anyway.  I never trust a web site to be there beyond the particular point in time that I am accessing it for the first time.  I keep all of this material backed up on at least two external hard drives and the most valuable of it, also on DVDs.  I am very meticulous about backing up data.

We never carry balances on credit cards (I only have one, and it is always at zero balance by the end of the month and usually before).

We live in a condo as has been discussed.  We have hot water heat that is included in our association fee, which also covers all common area (i.e.outside our individual condos) maintenance and building  insurance all year around (i.e. including lawn and yard care and snow removal), and our reserve fund for any repairs and is quite healthy.  Since I am board president, I make sure our financial situation remains sound and fight strenuously when somebody wants to borrow money for some repair.  There is something really odd or "off" about my (baby boomer) generation that it loves credit (and casinos for some reason) and can't seem to get enough of it, so I must stay on the board to make sure we don't go down that slippery slope ever.  The only items we pay for separately are electricity, our flip phones, and our internet service.  We would have to pay for cable or satellite TV if we wanted to take on that type of expense.

We don't have subscriptions or cable/satellite TV or other such services, though they are optionally available in our building.  We own our cable modem instead of renting one.  Our internet service is the lowest tier at 12 mb.  Having written code that runs in a lot of the routers and switches in commercial use today, and set up many servers, I know that no matter how fast your subscription allows for, your connection to a given server is only as fast as the slowest link in the path and also depends on how loaded the server you are connecting to is at that time.  Rarely will you see the full bandwidth you are paying for, and never will you hear or see a company selling such service tell you that.  What you can see is the ability to have multiple connections such as downloading more files at once, if that is important to a given user.

Overall, compared to individual homeowners in our area, we live a fair amount less expensively than they do because all those big and little things that add up are included in our association fee that is spread across all 72 units such as trash collection, recycling, roof replacement, elevator repair, etc.  How many homeowners maintain a separate fund for the big expenses that come up such as having the roof replaced, the heating system repaired or replaced, etc.?   From conversations I have had with many of these individual homeowners, none do that, instead preferring to borrow. 

I have written extensively in previous emails about how our condo association's finances are handled, so I won't do that here.

No matter how a person chooses to live, you will either be paying all this stuff in your rent or as a homeowner directly to the various providers. So living collectively, we can spread most of these costs across a large number of people, lessening the burden on each.

We do individually pay property tax since as far as the county is concerned, we have a 1200 sq. foot house with a two car garage.  Our area has the lowest property and sales taxes in the entire metro area.  I don't think we could live any cheaper anywhere else around our area, especially since we have not had a mortgage in years.  

Condo living is certainly not for everybody, so I am hesitant to recommend it. I know folks here have expressed a clear distaste for that lifestyle. In my opinion, similar to deciding whether to have kids or not, it is far better to know your needs and wants ahead of time, rather than after the fact when it is too late.  However, for those for whom it is a good match, it can work quite well, as it has for us for the past 32 years.

Tony

@tbeltrans, By "data" RobertW, means don't pay extra to have internet access on your phone plan.  Very few people actually need data on their phones, they just like having it.  Free WiFi is available just about everywhere if one really needs to access the internet while out and about.

I only got my first smart phone a couple years ago and lucked into an amazing plan for it:
Unlimited calling and texting, Canada wide, for 20 bucks a month.  Discounted international calling and texting for an extra 1 buck a month.  No data.  To cancellation fees.  No plan obligation (there's no minimum time that I'm locked into this plan).  No phone purchase necessary.  Paper billing.  No expiry date.  This was a "manager's special" only offered for 2 days at Christmas, so I jumped on it.  lol.

Also, I will go to my grave before I do anything on my phone that has to do with access to any of my very private or personal data, especially my bank account.  That stuff I do from home, behind all kinds of good security, software and hardware.

At the end of the day, "smart phones" make people dumb if they don't have the discipline to make sure they keep them in their place so to speak.  Data (internet access on the phone) is one of those things that seduces people into smart phone addiction.

Be patient, keep calling whatever provider you want to go with and asking what deals are available and sooner or later, you should stumble into an amazingly affordable one.    Without data that is.

TonyKgull,

Thanks for all the info. I don't expect to need a smart phone for several years, if ever. I am just remaining open to the possibility (however remote) that I MAY need to go that route someday. All I have is voice and I have texting blocked because I would get charged a few cents every time I receive a text since it isn't built into my plan. To me, what a smart phone offers, especially internet access and all these compelling applications, is a rabbit hole I just don't want to add to my life.

As for "free" public wifi, if people don't take care to make sure their connection is secure (usually with a private VPN service), they will create a rather hellish life for themselves when the information they are accessing gets hacked. So, to be safe, there really is a cost involved one way or another.

I don't get involved in social media either. I have a facebook account that is locked down so nobody has access to my non-existent home page, and I NEVER respond to the emails telling me of potential "friends". The only reason for having that account is that from time to time, I will take an online class that meets in a private facebook account set up by the instructor. Otherwise, I wouldn't even have that.

Forums are enough of a "time suck" (and I only ever read 3 forums at most, participating in two) that I can't imagine how people find time to live their lives if they are involved in twitter and whatever else people get themselves wrapped around. My wife can spend hours in front of her computer when she gets on facebook.

If there were local folks who got together around the subjects of the forums I do read, I would pick real in-person contact over forums in a heartbeat because you then get to form real bonds and all the communication happens with body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, and immediate clarifications. However, considering that maybe 1% of the population shares my interests, it would take a LOT of people to get even a small group together, hence, forums.

Tony

TonyKgull,

Yes, I can certainly see all those advantages for a smart phone. There are three things that I am curious about though:

1. The size - it wouldn't fit in my pants pocket and I wouldn't want it in a shirt pocket where it would fall out if I am not standing up straight; for me, reading on it would be a recipe for eye strain. I take my kindle with me if I know I am going to have to wait somewhere.
2. Battery life.

I don't have a desktop computer and have not had one since the mid-90s. I have long had a laptop instead. Battery life doesn't become much of an issue because for me, I only use it at home and am always within reach of an outlet. My current laptop is a Dell XPS 15 (15.1" 4k display, 32 GB RAM, 2 TB Samsung SSD, 8th gen i7, etc.). It straddles a line between high end business machine and gaming machine. I am sitting in my recliner typing this post.

Mostly, I use Transcribe! for guitar teaching videos and audio learning by ear, Chrome for browser, and Libre (Open) Office for most everything else.

Tony

TonyKgull,

From what I have read and heard, Samsung is the best bet for a non-Apple smart phone. I wasn't aware of there being different sizes of smart phones. When I see people with them, they remind me of how women used to carry cigarette packs, always in some special thing that looked like a purse intended to hold change. I don't see people carrying them in front pants pockets, which is where I keep my flip phone. I have never dropped or broken one. The one reason we replaced our cell phones was because the protocols were changing and our old ones were either not getting, or dropping calls. Our cell phones were at least 15 years old at that time of the upgrade.

What you describe for battery life seems fine to me. I shut our cell phones off in the evening and plug them in, so running out of battery is never an issue. Our home phone is my wife's cell phone and mine is just another number. We don't want to get calls at night, so being able to turn both off is a plus which smart phones would also afford.

If the time comes that we absolutely need smart phones to do whatever we need to do, then I will look into it further. I am a rather quick study when it comes to technology, so I can come up to speed in short order on whatever I need to know at that time.

As for my laptop, I tend to buy a decent one and keep it for years. I also shop sales when that time comes, so I never pay full price for any of this stuff.

Here is the irony I see about technology. Many of the folks I worked with in my career as a software engineer were very much focused on the environment and always self-righteously lecturing people or commenting on how hurtful general practices were to the environment. Yet, when it came to technology, these folks had to have the latest and greatest smart phones, laptops, desktops, and game boxes. The problem I see with these devices is that they go "obsolete" (sometimes for real and other times it is just a marketing ploy) well before they are no longer functional, leaving a big trail of non-environmentally friendly discards behind them. If a person wants to stay up to date with the latest and greatest, it seems that every two years or so, it is time for something new and shiny and a perfectly functional device goes on the scrap heap. It can be the ultimate hypocrisy.

Tony

Garland,

You don't need to. Please realize that, just as in person-to-person conversation where everybody is physically present, a question or statement can spark several lines of conversation. Unfortunately, we now see very clearly that a question or statement can divide an entire country very quickly because any utterance can travel so widely, so quickly. To bring that to guitars, there have been some rather vicious attacks between forum members in other guitar-related forums in threads that start without any such intention.

So I would say that you can be pleased that your original post started a quite congenial series of discussion material.

Tony



Tony