Glad to know I’m not alone… I paid $10 for a Go-phone ATT&T phone, no contract. It’s a little flip phone, I also paid $100 for 1000 a minutes that should last me a whole year.

[quote=Diego Mamani]Glad to know I’m not alone… I paid $10 for a Go-phone ATT&T phone, no contract. It’s a little flip phone, I also paid $100 for 1000 a minutes that should last me a whole year.[/quote]

Don’t the minutes expire per month if you don’t use them?
That was always my beef with prepaid phones.

I think in some areas of life, simplifying is good, but not so when it comes to phones. Go ahead, pick out your casket, not me. My employer provides me with a blackberry and I hate it, I often forward those call to my iphone. The iphone is simple in many ways, having to text on a flip phone pushing numbers on a number pad multiple times till the correct letter comes up is not my idea of simple, having to enter a password or push “7” to delete a message or be forced to listen to all of my messages to get to the one I want is not simple, it’s a pain in the ass. Don’t run from tech, embrace it. I even have my car’s idrive all figured out and I love it now. I hate driving without nav/live traffic and estimated time of arrival, it sucks. Anything but FIOS feels like dial up to me. Go ahead, let the world get away from you, I will be that guy in the old folks home with 700 channels of porn and sports on his ipad while you read the newspaper and complain about the government. Let’s see who’s room the nurses hang out in.

[quote=flu]Don’t the minutes expire per month if you don’t use them?
That was always my beef with prepaid phones.[/quote]
Flu, the minutes don’t expire for a year if you buy $100 worth of them at a time. That’s 1000 minutes, and that’s the case with T-Mobile and AT&T prepaid that I know if. If you buy less than $100, say, only $10 or $50, then the minutes expire after 30 or 60 days, and also the per-minute price is higher.

I hate yapping on the phone. I have a cell so that I can be reached when I’m on the road, and also b/c it’s so hard to find pay phones nowadays. When people call me (or when I call) I get to business right away and then finish the call. If they want to get social and talk about the weather, their pets, or the Padres, I tell them that I have to go, or that the connection is getting weak and I offer to call them back when I get home or office (and then I do call them back from a landline).

That way, the 1000 minutes truly last me a year, easily. To refill you can do it over the phone with your credit card, buy a card from Target, etc. Once I bought the $100 card from eBay for only $94, and no shipping involved: the seller took care of adding the minutes to my account.

Smartphones make life easier, which to me is simplifying. Sure I survived just fine without it, but apps do make you more efficient. A few weeks ago I was on the road (parked) and needed something dry cleaned overnight on a weekend. I googled dry cleaners (don’t need to enter the area, it knows where I am), touched the phone number which puts it in the dialer, called to ask if they could help me. Three calls later I found one, then touched the address to navigate there. Sure, you could do the same thing with a flip phone and pen/paper/GPS, but a smartphone makes it effortless. In the dark ages, I would have needed a phone booth, yellow pages, and a pocketful of quarters.

Not to mention zillowing and calculating mortgages while house hunting, a grocery shopping list sorted by aisle (with pics of the items, which drop to the bottom of the list as they are checked off – the other day it took me 5 minutes to load up $200 worth of stuff), comparing prices and reading reviews while looking at the actual item in the store, IMDB’ing that actress on TV without moving from the couch, etc. It is the most useful tool I own – more useful than my PC, although not as essential.

For those who don’t like to text (me included), those moments when you have no choice become not only bearable but easy. The ringer is off when I’m at my desk or in bed. You are only as accessible as you want to be.

Add me to the luddite camp. I never went to a data plan. I could never justify the monthly wallet hit.

I have internet access at home and at work. Why do I need it in the car when I’m going to/from work?

When I’m at kids sporting events, I want to pay attention to the kid… not my phone. And if there’s down time waiting for a kid – I always have a library book with me.

I’m cheap… that’s the basic reason.

[quote=Diego Mamani]My good friend, you realize that the whole discipline of economics wouldn’t exist at all if resources were not limited.[/quote]

You don’t need unlimited resources to have a smartphone, a nice retirement, and travel (none of which are dumb). It’s not like we’re describing solid gold bathtubs – these things are completely within reason. Besides, I have the attitude that my income shouldn’t determine my goals. My goals determine my income. Luckily I have mostly modest goals. However, if I did anticipate not having enough money, I could sacrifice something I consider to be less important in order to have a smartphone and travel – for example, by living in a couple hundred fewer square feet.