Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Archive for August 19th, 2009

I have found that in my life that I do not change unless the situation I am in, causes drastic change (i.e. I cannot do things in small measures, it must be a big thing). I need a good reason to change, and that reason can’t be rationalized easily, that is how I usually succeed.

Question: Could you live without a cell phone? Do you use your cell phone at your work? Do you text at work? Do you text or use your cell phone at work, when you should be working? Do you text message in meetings, or on teleconferences? Do you text while driving? If any of these questions made you think that you might be addicted to your cell phone, then good (let’s not get into the entire Crackberry generation, talk about enabling ADHD).

Currently my wife and I pay upwards of $90 a month for two cell phones, which is a ridiculous sum of money for how much we use this service. This and a few other factors are pushing me towards cutting down my cell phone usage, if not completely cutting it out (we’ll see if I can go all the way, and lose the addiction).

Our Cell Phone usage consists of:

• Text messaging each other and our kids (55% of time)
• Calling each other and home (35%)
• Calling others and emergency calls and such (less than 10%)

We will be cancelling our contract when it expires in a month or so and moving over to a pay per use model and see how that works (luckily we can keep our phone numbers).  I suspect that there will be moments where I might regret this decision, however, I will remember this is for a larger good.

CPI Tomorrow

Given my new position, I will be commenting on the CPI numbers (that come out today) in tomorrow’s posting, stay tuned.