Canadian Personal Finance Blog

A friend is doing some number crunching trying to figure out which is the cheapest Cell Phone plan that she can get that fits her needs, so her and I have been discussing various pay per use plans (I know something about them because both my daughters have those set ups), I am not sure what her final decision was (I will post it when I know), but this caused me to look at my phone bills and I was flabbergasted to see just how much I pay per month for my phones.

The total this month is $190.00 (approx), for 1 home phone line (with a long distance package) and 2 cell phones all from Bell.

I leave that in a paragraph by itself because I am astounded at that number. That is more than I pay to heat my house and it is about 80% of what I pay in Electric + Natural Gas, this is ridiculous, and I am now banging my head on my desk realizing this is one of my major expenses every month.

I am getting nailed for the long distance plan on my home phone, but I am getting obliterated by long distance charges and text’ing charges on my cell phones. My wife and I save long distance charges by sending text message, however, evidently we send too darn many.

This is my new target for controlling costs, as this is a crazy expense. Anyone care to comment on their cell phone expenses and how they keep this expense down, I am open to suggestions (two tin cans and a piece of wire is one of my ideas right now).

Carnivals This Week

I am sending in posts to carnivals again so you can read some of my previous works at:

• The Carnival of Debt Reduction #141 has my post Debt Reduction is like Teenage Sex.
• The Carnival of Debt Management #53 has the same post up too.

I was talking with a co-worker yesterday and he mentioned that he had started setting up Vonage as his home phone set up using Voice Over IP. He seemed quite happy with the price and set up (he is very technical but claimed you didn’t need to be).

The set up sounded simple, where you initially get a temporary phone number to start with with your Vonage package, and then you can have Vonage transfer your home phone number over to them, and you get all of the features you want for good prices. Remember to work with Vonage, you must have high speed Internet access to your house AS WELL to get Vonage to work.

Currently, I am paying about $66 a month for Bell local service + a long distance package, and I am pretty sure this is not the best use of my money for phone access. I also pay $80 a month for wireless phones (two numbers), I pay $50 a month for high speed data access as well, and another $66 a month for Cable Television. I keep looking at this lump of about $260-$280 I spent a month and wonder how much cheaper I can make this, while keeping all these services reliable?

• If I lump everything together with either Bell or Rogers, I get discounts, but every time I talk to either of them, the person I talk to, look at my current account and say I am getting as cheap as I can with them, OR, I cannot change because I am “locked in” to a specific contract? (that is bull poop, all of the wireless contracts are changeable, you just have to be persistent).
• If I go for the cheapest in each area I would end up with:
• National Capitol FreeNet broadband access (which has some limitations, but is cheap)
• Voice Over IP with Vonage or someone like that
• Pay per use cell phones with Fido or someone of that ilk
• Cable TV? Maybe I should be thinking about rethinking this and using RSS feeds for TV shows?
• Buy a long distance card service which only charges 2 cents a minute for long distance in North America.

The problem with the “cheapest” set up is that you get what you pay for a lot of times, I am also very lazy, and changing all of this is a lot of work as well.

My conclusions are that I will most likely continue to complain about this for a while, and might do something about a few things, but nothing too drastic, but I will keep you posted.

On the Financial Big picture question I end up with some more interesting fundamental questions on how some companies do business:

• How much does BCE make on long distance and home phone access? Strikes me that this is a shrinking market with a bunch of new players attempting to turn all of this into commodity pricing.
• High Speed home access charges in Canada are still at the Criminal level, and neither Rogers nor Bell are planning on changing that, for as long as they can.
• Wireless providers like Telus are attempting to make inroads on Bell as well.

So you have a relatively set pie of money being spent by consumers, and MANY different players (and the government keeping larger foreign competitors out of the market), what does this mean for the future? Darn good question, need to look into that more as well.

So last week I mentioned that Stats Canada was talking about the “Big C”, in Cancer Now that I have Your Attention but now a relative new comer at Riscario Insider has made a very good post about Critical Illness: The Basics outlining what Canadians are doing about catastrophic illnesses, a good read.

A topic more near and dear to my heart (and wallet) is Stats Canada’s statement about Telecommunications Statistics. Operating profit in the Wireless side of the telecom world is up 67% in Canada (year over year) from last year at this time, which is a good thing to see.

Growth in this industry is a good thing, since it shows there is market space still to be exploited (good for BCE, NT, Telus, and other Wireless associated companies). The other side of the coin, in the wired world (home phones and such) is not as good, with their profits dropping by 27%. An interesting statistic is:

There were 55.1 mobile subscribers per 100 inhabitants at the end of 2006, almost identical to the 55.3 traditional wireline access lines per 100 inhabitants.

So the penetration of the wireless phone in Canada is the same as for regular phones? That’s pretty important, of course in Europe there are even higher penetration numbers. How much more network build out do the Canadian Wireless operators need to set up?