Saturday, February 2, 2013

Cut backs in pricing of typical household items...


Fixed incomes to the young must be somewhat confusing. But to the retired folks that have income from pensions, social security or even savings and investments that is what is meant by that. And if you are lucky enough to have all of those you are on a somewhat set/fixed income to survive the expenses that fluctuate throughout your golden years that makes your life one that your children would love to strive for. But the most horrid thing a retiree could possibly not have is enough to survive and sadly need help from their children and in this economy that has been the case for many… We are in the in-between group that were fortunate enough to scale down years ago from a big expensive home with much higher utility bills, taxes and all that goes with that lifestyle and so except for the things in life that no one has any idea that it will happen, like illness, we are doing okay! And thankfully, no, we have not had to ask our children for anything or them for anything from us, since they are very healthy financially too. But we would help if need be and they would too...or not...we would not ask ever I would hope to think. But not everyone can say that and I suppose we are very lucky in that respect and should remember that daily. That is not to say that we cannot tweak our living expenses even more…And I think I have found another way to; for eight years Hubby and I have had two cell phones with two numbers and over those years they have come in quite handy, especially when we would lose each other in malls or stores or since I have stopped driving for him to come and get me for my haircut when done or when he goes out to call me to see if we need anything else or me to call him that I forgot something and we also have no long distance on the house phone, only on them… and for those two phones and for all these years we felt we had a pretty good deal for around $65 a month for both including taxes etc. it breaks down to $49.99 for mine I initiated it, and $9.99 for his, plus taxes. You see, Hubby had to have one that was for his job as a deputy, but they decided that it could not be used for personal use, although, they all had to pay for any overage charges they made. They changed the policy just a couple of years before he retired for the whole department and so for a couple of years he had two of them one for business and one personal. And when he retired that is when he was glad he had the personal one still. And the price was discounted since he was a deputy, even as a retired one too and since. But with all those deals out there and our phones really rickety we decided this year for before our anniversary coming up soon we should look for one of those other deals that seem to be rampant in TV commercials… The funny things is we have thousands of rollover minutes that we never use and now this might sound odd to most of you but our use of our cells, we checked our bills is down to an average of about only fifty minutes a month! Now most would say do you really feel you need them and we both said an absolute yes, due to the weather situations here in our state if we ever had to evacuate… and of course for the other ones I sited. So we have been scanning the net and many seem to have better deals for more realistic minutes for our needs and the fraction of the cost and so over the next couple of weeks we will be checking into all the possibilities, some claim as low as $10 or $15 a month for two phones and some like ours initially offer free phones. We have a job ahead of us but really we waited this long so we are in no rush. I tease people when we say we have such old phones and I say yes, but BIG BROTHER cannot track us without any GPS in them, hmm? PS we do not text. Our phones have the capability to and to take pictures too, but we don’t use it, since we had them disconnect the ability to forward those particular apps. We felt we didn’t need them. They are both Nokias and in the day, they were really great. Our non-contract is with AT&T, but there are so many out there Consumer Cellular is one that looks pretty good for our needs, copy and paste to find out more: https://www.consumercellular.com , but we have also looked at the ones the brick and mortar stores have in their offerings too… All in all we are performing our idea of cutbacks, thus my tonight’s title, nickel and diming our own expenses, by trimming the fat. Okay, since my own fat trimming seems to be on hold, our financial one has more opening in that realm than I, ha; and so why not, hmm? More money to spend on things like next year’s insurance and tax raisings, right? On that note of a big truth, allow me to be the very first to wish all of you a very happy good night and ask you to kindly count all your blessings and share all those overages with you know who and we will too! And next time please be here or be square, ya hear? PS Oddly enough our home phone which is also the same company for our DSL, CenturyLink just raised their bill another ten bucks a month today! It could be a losing battle, but I will not ever give up when there is any hope of changing our fate… to a more manageable one.

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