cell phones

Is Google Fi Worth It?

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project-fi-coverage-review

I’ve had Google’s new cell phone service, called Fi, for just over a year now, and I’ve had a chance to get a good feel for it, as well as what I used to pay, and what various people pay now. So, is Google’s Project Fi a good deal, or is it not worth it? Google Fi Service The service you get from Google’s Fi cellphone service is a blend. First, in order to use the service, you have to use specific devices like a Nexus 5x, a Nexus 6P, or the new Google Pixel phones. If you buy them direct from Google and the Google Fi store, then your customer service comes from Google. This is a good thing. If not, your service comes from wherever you bought your phone. I’ve had a couple of chances to use Google’s customer service on the Google Fi platform. First, I dropped my phone and cracked the screen. (I firmly believe that the first phone company to produce a high-end phone with a user replaceable screen will own the market until everyone else catches up.) I have the device protection plan through Google Fi (more on that later), so I called up …

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AT&T Slashes Dividend

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AT&T Slashes Dividend 1

AT&T is making big moves, are they good for AT&T, or bad for AT&T. As everyone knows, I’m a dividend guy. I believe in buying the stocks of good companies and then treating them like bonds, collecting interest payments while ignoring price movements. Usually, when you buy a solid, US company stock with a dividend, that dividend is yours more or less forever. If you buy Apple today (2/4/22) you’ll get about a 0.50% dividend yield. If you like, you can choose to think of it as buying an Apple CD that pays 0.50% with a five-year (or 10, or 3, or whatever) maturity date. When you do that, the daily price movements of Apple stock are irrelevant to your financial plans which count on nothing more than receiving 0.50% interest, and some day getting your principal back (with some risk). AT&T Dividend Cut But, sometimes, a company can cut its dividend. Usually that isn’t a huge surprise. In the case of AT&T, there has been talk of changing (cutting) the dividend for some time now. That being said, a 50% cut is a big deal. As of yesterday, the annual dividend yield for AT&T stock was over 8%. As …

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Budget Killers – Cell Phones

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Budget Killers - Cell Phones 2

I just realized that in the last 10 years I never wrote a basic budgeting article for Finance Gourmet. There are a few reasons for that. One, when you get going as a former financial advisor writing a real-world personal finance advice website, you want to jump into the juicy stuff. Two, once you have been writing that juicy stuff for a while, you just assume that you have covered some of those basics. And three, budgeting is actually a personal thing. What works for one person doesn’t work so well for others. Anyway, look for my basic budgeting article in the next few days. For today, I want to start my series on Budget Killers. As a financial advisor, and as a regular finance writer today, I have seen common things that blow up a budget. I’ve also seen less common things that blow up a budget (owning a horse, motorcycle racing, and more). Let’s start with one of the most common things that blows up a budget, cell phones. Cell Phone Budget Killers It isn’t uncommon to see monthly cell phone bills in the hundreds of dollars. Unfortunately, many people don’t see the costs adding up until it …

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Is SquareTrade a Good Deal

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squaretrade warranty

SquareTrade has been bought by Allstate. Allstate is an insurance company that does auto, home, and life insurance. They now do item protection plans like SquareTrade used to do. I first wrote about SquareTrade  back in 2009. At the time, I was overjoyed at the concept of warranties from Square Trade. If you don’t remember, 2009 was the era of incredibly overpriced extended warranties from electronics stores. It turns out that companies like Circuit City were selling merchandise at a tiny profit, and making all of their money by having their salespeople push high cost extended warranties on anything. Even worse, when you tried to collect on that coverage, it turned out that your warranty wasn’t actually from the company you bought it from, but some business you never heard of, and that didn’t really care what you thought about them, their service, or their coverage. Is SquareTrade a Scam? First off, SquareTrade is a legitimate company. It is now part of Allstate and they seem to be doing away with the name in favor of Allstate Protection plans. They’ve been in business for a long time now and have plenty of satisfied customers. However, there are some complaints about …

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FCC Fake Fines T-Moble $48 Million

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tmobile fine

When is $48 million not $48 million? When it is a FCC fine. T-Mobile was fined $48 million today by the FCC for misleading customers about its unlimited data plans. As it turns out, T-Mobile’s unlimited data plan was actually a 17 GB per month plan. After that the company “de-prioritized” the customer’s traffic making it so slow as to be pretty much unusable. Most unlimited plans work this way, of course, because unlimited isn’t really feasible. The reality is that there is only so much data a “normal” user would use in the course of a month, and racking up 17 GB would require some pretty heavy effort. This is a problem of the cell phone carriers own making. They market against each other in such a way that customers now believe that they must have unlimited data even though many of them don’t use anywhere near that much. So now, carriers work overtime to shout UNLIMITED whenever possible, and then hide actual limits in the fine print. In this case, T-Mobile even tried to not be honest in the fine print, and that’s when the FCC struck with its huge fine, except… It’s Not Really $48 Million The …

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Cell Phone Bills Too High for Budget

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The Wall Street Journal recently published an article about how cellphones are eating the family budget. It seems as though the idea and everything but the words were lifted from an earlier article in the Boston Globe. Whatever the source, this is something that I saw coming years ago as a financial planner, and now, it seems things are maybe worse than ever when it comes to your budget and your cell phone. Your Cell Phones, Your Budget When I was a Certified Financial Planner advising clients, one of the first steps (after signing them up as clients) was to review their budget. For the wealthy, a budget isn’t really all that useful or eye-opening, but for everyone else, a budget can reveal some very ugly truths. First, most people spend way more money each month on things than they think they do. Nothing is a bigger shocker than filling out a budget that includes everything you THINK you spend money on each month, and then sitting down with someone and matching that up to your bank and credit card statements to see what you ACTUALLY spend each month. Second, for most people, there actually isn’t much they can do …

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