Canadian Personal Finance Blog

$69.99 For Everything?

Sprint Telecom in the U.S. has just announced a very intriguing package for their Cell Phone subscribers, which is $69.99 for:

• Unlimited long distance calling in the continental US
• Unlimited text’ing
• Unlimited data usage with your mobile device

So this effectively means you can merge your:

• Home Phone
• Cell Phone
• Internet Connection

Into one bill that allegedly only costs $69 a month? Holy cow! Now I have no doubt that “Unlimited” may very well have it’s limits, but it does show what competition does to a marketplace.

Currently in the U.S. there are Four National Carriers (according to Barron’s) AT&T, Sprint Nextel, Verizon and T-Mobile. There are many more regional pay per use carriers and this number of competitors means that that with slowing Cell Phone growth (single digit growth soon to be almost zero), the only way to get “new” customers is by Cut Throat (if not suicidal) pricing practices. All of these competitors will be sacrificing profits for simple market share (hoping that once their competitors die off they will be able to make their money then).

In Canada, there is nowhere near this level of competition and we pay some of the highest prices in the world for Wireless access (not sure about home phone, but I suspect we are not very cheap either).

Competition is never a bad thing, unless you are a shareholder in one of the companies competing (especially if you choose the losing company in the competition).

How much do you pay for your Internet + Cell Phone + Home Phone ? I pay over $200, closer to $300 really, which really is too much.

I’ve mentioned this before, but the concept of keeping paper copies of your bills is becoming a more and more antiquated idea (in my opinion).

Keep That Paper?

It used to be that you kept your tax returns (hard copy) (and receipts!!) for 10 years (I think that might be less), and you kept your credit card bills for about 3 years and other bills for at least a year as well (if anyone wishes to correct me please feel free). This was in case problems arose or there was a disagreement about a specific bill.

The problem I have now is that I never print out my tax return, because I e-file my return. I do “print” out a copy using Adobe Acrobat, which I can look at (it looks like a regular form), and I do keep my receipts in hard copy, but I never print out my tax return. What happens if I get audited? I guess I print out my return, and find all my receipts, and off I go to see Mr. or Mrs. CRA.

Electronic Copies Take Up Less Space

I now scan all bills that arrive in the mail, so I keep an electronic record of it, but I typically shred the paper bill after it is paid. Some of my bills don’t even arrive in a paper copy anymore (my Bell bill and other bills are offering this option as well). I simply save a copy of the e-bill on my computer (and make sure I make a back up of them as well).

Less storage is needed for the paper, but are these electronic copies “legal”? I think they are, they are simply images of an original, but when would you need a bill for legal reasons? I guess if you are disputing a bill you would. Anyone have any examples of this I’d love to hear about them.

The Paper Less Society?

Are we truly in the paper-less society finally? The paper less society was a term coined in the mid-80’s as computers became more prevalent and there was an idea that Paper copies of things would become a thing of the past and all records would be kept “electronically”. Are we finally living in this utopian ideal of no need for paper records? Not really, but hopefully there is less paper being used for bills and financial tracking.

This is a reprise of one of my favorite NFB shorts, called My Financial Career based on a story by noted Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock.

For my regular readers you’ll know I have already posted this once, but I do love to reminisce with this animated short because it shows so many of the interesting traits the “old” banking system used to have:

• Bankers’ Hours, which were 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM Monday to Thursday and 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM on Friday and heaven forbid you talk about weekend hours!
• Talking to someone directly about your banking

I chuckle every time I watch this witty and wonderful short

In an attempt to ease the writing pressures I have found another “oldie but goody” from the vaults, talking about my favorite topic, bank fees. Never pay more than you have to!

Free Banking?

Last night, my wife and I went for our yearly meeting with our current bank to move some money around, update our kids’ RESPs and to attempt to receive Free Banking. My wife was sure that this was not going to happen, and that we were going to walk out of their empty handed, and I would be ranting about how we have to change banks. I guessed I might get something, given I had some compelling arguments, so we had a friendly wager(my wife taking the “We are going to continue paying bank fees” side of the bet) for a sweet treat at a local food establishment.

Now if you don’t remember my compelling arguments were outlined in yesterday’s posting: Changings Banks? but I thought of 1 or 2 other arguments just in case.

My extra arguments that I thought of on the spot during the discussions were:

• If I walked into the Bank of Montreal down the road, and say, I’d like to transfer all of my banking to this branch today, if you give me free banking for a year, I am sure they would comply with my request (and if they didn’t I could simply go to the Scotiabank in the same mall and ask them for the same deal).
• Why if I was a new client, you would give me a free iPod which retails for about $130, yet as a customer in good standing, you expect me to pay $156 a year to use your bank?

The meeting was quite cordial, and we got the banking we needed done, and we were very happy with the service that we received, but when we were left alone, my wife was still adamant that we would not get any concessions (and I was starting to wonder if she was right).

The counter points made by my bank representative were:

• PC Financial and ING have no service charges because they are virtual banks and have much lower overhead, due to them not really having “branches”. This is an interesting argument, except that PC Financial isn’t even really a bank, it is a FRONT to CIBC right now.
• There is a policy not to give free banking services to anyone, since this is a business. As a share holder in TD I am glad to hear that, since I like seeing companies I invest in profit, however as a customer I am not happy to hear that.
• An implied argument, but never stated directly was, “If I give YOU free banking, everybody will want it”, which is very true.
• If I carried the minimum balance in my checking account (I think it is $1000) I would get free banking (i.e. no bank fees would be charged), so why wasn’t I doing that? I pointed out $1000 in my bank account does me little good, but $1000 paid on my debts, does a great deal of good. My guess is if I ever get out of debt, I will carry a balance and get free banking (of course by then I will get the Senior Citizen discount).

What was the final resolution of this discussion? Well, I promised the bank representative that I would not say, and I will abide by that agreement.

Later in the evening I did enjoy the Dairy Queen Blizzard that my wife bought for me, and I will enjoy it for the entire year.

That has been a question that Mrs. C8j has been asking me for a while, and I have been too chicken to go to the Bell Mobility store near us to find out (the service there is, um, not up to my expectations). I continued to mull around how exactly to figure this out, as we are sure we will be changing to a “pay per play” model once the contract is over (I am currently paying anywhere from $90 to $120 a month for two phones), and I finally stumbled upon how to solve this riddle.

When Do I get a Phone Upgrade?

Yes, this seems to be the magical information that is directly tied to when my account can be renewed.

How do I find this information out? Follow these steps:

1. Log into your MyBell account (if you haven’t done this, do so, it is free)
2. Go to the My Services Section and select See or Change Rates for your wireless account
3. In my case since I have two phones it then asks for which phone number you want to look at thus you select the phone number you are interested in (or you may not see this screen at all).
4. A page entitle My Wireless will come up on your screen.  In there is a section which is titled My Phone, and you should have a link to Upgrade My Phone (click on it).
5. Here is where the information you search lies.

On my page, there is a line that says:

If you wait until 2009/09/02 to upgrade you’ll be eligible for a credit of up to $200.00.

The only reason that Bell would give me that kind of credit is to retain my account, thus I have found when my contract expires with Bell. I get $200 if I renew for 3 years, how nice.

Caveat: Be careful with this methodology that you do not go too far and accidentally end up either “renewing” your contract -or- upgrading your phone!