Of Cell Phone Bills and GMail
How to Save Money on Your Cell Phone
In two words: question everything.
Recently I reduced my cell phone bill $30 a month. Maybe that isn’t a big deal to you, but $360 a year for 20 minutes hard work? That’s a no-brainer to me. I did it by taking a long, careful look at every item on my monthly bill. It turns out I was being charged $2 a month for “enhanced directory services,” something I knew nothing about, didn’t want, and got easily removed.
But the real savings was in discovering I was buying way more “anytime minutes” than I needed.
That took some digging at my cell phone provider’s Web site to get my actual usage history. They have a “plan optimizer” tool that is supposed to analyze your usage and suggest ways to save money, but it was less than worthless. To get my actual number of minutes a month I had to look at previous bills one by one. I was paying for 350 more minutes a month than I was using.
I’ll bet you’re doing the same, especially since the economy has slowed down.
From there it was only a matter of a phone call to Customer Support to reduce my plan.
You might try the same.
Gmail and Privacy
“GMail” is a free email service from Google. Lots of people have email addresses that end in “@gmail.com”.
This may not be news, I’ve known it for years, but Google scans GMail messages and builds a profile on you for sale to advertisers.
This effects you even if you do not have a GMail account.
Google scans messages you reply to or send to GMail subscribers.
If you’re planning, say, a ski vacation with a group of your friends and one of them has a GMail address, suddenly the pop-up ads on the Web sites you go to have offers for discounts at ski resorts. I have seen this happen. The process takes less than a day.
Not exactly evil, but scary.
-LLiioonneell
Lionel Goulet
Te Deum