Save by Sharing – AT&T & Me

Posted on December 18, 2007
Filed Under Saving Money | Leave a Comment

One of my most annoying expenditures is paying for a cell phone. For some reason I’ve never gotten past the fact that mobility costs so much more than a land line. I mean how in the world can “air” cost more than copper strung on poles or in the ground.

Well it can’t, but there you go – don’t get me started.

First, the cell was merely handy, but somewhere along the way it became indispensable. The sensible thing would be to get rid of either the land line or cell, but because each provides features the other can’t, I’m stuck with both.

cell phone plans - friends and family But this post is not intended as a rant but rather to describe a way I found to save some serious bucks, so let me get on with it.

Until recently I was paying for 3 separate cell phones. Mine, one for my wife, and one for my younger son – don’t ask! Each was set up at different times on different plans that seemed to make sense at the time.

But over time the dynamics changed, and our existing plans became outdated. Features like free nights and weekends, free mobile to mobile, unlimited text messaging, etc., meant we just didn’t need all those anytime minutes anymore. I had thousands of rollover minutes that were just expiring after 12 months.

Upon investigating alternatives, I found this family package thing where you can share minutes. The one I’ll describe happens to be from AT&T but most of the other guys have similar deals.

The key thing is you can have up to 4 phones all sharing the same bucket of anytime minutes. I picked a plan with 550 anytime minutes because when analyzing our usage, the 3 of us were just under that. continue reading….

Quitting Smoking Again – Week 6: Getting Cocky

Posted on December 7, 2007
Filed Under Healthy Living, Quit Smoking | Leave a Comment

The interesting thing now is that I really don’t think about “not smoking” all that much. In fact somewhere around a month in I noticed that smoking isn’t all consuming anymore. I don’t mean quitting has been agonizing or hard, in fact quite the contrary.

One of the things I did was change focus from that of previous attempts. It’s hard to just “quit” anything because quitting leaves a void. It’s easier to “do” something. So instead of “quitting smoking” I reverse the thinking into positive things, like “I’m going to get healthier”, or “saving money”, or even better, “I’m going to breathe deeply again”.

By the way, this was one of the areas covered in the book I mentioned before - The Easy Way to Stop Smoking by Allen Carr. Again I have to admit to being skeptical when first seeing it, but having actually made it for 6 weeks thus far, I feel pretty good about recommending it to anyone really wanting some help in quitting.

It’s one of the best stop smoking resources I’ve seen because it teaches that quitting successfully starts and finishes in the mind. The physical part of smoking, including the addiction to nicotine is not where the real difficulty lies in quitting.

I titled this post “getting cocky” because I’m sort of at that point where I’m confident I won’t start smoking again. But as I said before, I’ve quit many times, and one thing that happens is all of a sudden you realize, hey, I did it! At that point is the very real danger of over-confidence.

You either make the mistake of thinking one smoke won’t hurt, or you think that having quit this time, it will be easy enough to do again. Having done both these, I can attest, it’s dangerous thinking. Cigarette smoking is basically drug addiction, and it will absolutely hook you again.

So although I’m feeling cocky, I also know the experience of playing with fire and getting burned every time. Having “been there, done that, got the t-shirt”, I’ll pass.

I’m also feeling a lot better, energy is coming back, and because I’ve got a lot of damage to undo, I’m staying focused. I actually felt a whole lot better after the first couple days being quit, and improvements seem to come in spurts.

Shortness of breath is the big thing. It’s not as pronounced, and I can overcome it even during exercise, but from talking with other long-time ex-smokers, I suspect it could take as much as a year to get to where I no longer ever notice any difficultly breathing.

Next quit smoking post: Week 10
Previous quit smoking post: Day 20

Save by Sharing – AT&T & Me

Quitting Smoking Again – Week 6: Getting Cocky

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