Our family recently started a journey to simplify our lives further and get rid of our cell phones along with the cell phone bill. We had three 'smart' phones along with their family talk, text, and data plans that we were paying more than $200 a month for. I suspected that we were all fooled into thinking that we actually needed all of this and had believed that lie for almost 20 years now.
I found a neat little gadget called the MagicJack which provides a home phone for us at the cost of $20 per year. I ported our existing cell phone numbers from At&t to Google Voice for a one time fee of $20 per phone number. Google voice then allowed us to forward calls coming in on our old cell phone numbers to our new MagicJack home phone. This way our friends and family wouldn't even know what we had done. We could also send and receive text messages at no cost using Google Voice. There was the problem of being away from our new home phone without being able to make calls in some kind of emergency situation. For that we converted our old cell phones to pre paid at 10 cents per minute without any kind of activation or monthly fees.
The outcome from this move was strange at first, we found ourselves having to make plans before we left the house. Things like where we would be going, directions, and where and when we would meet back up again. It is teaching us to plan our day and stick to being somewhere when we said we would be there. After the initial loss of the cell phone was gone we felt as though a burden had been lifted. It feels nice that people cannot get a hold of you whenever they want. I never liked the fact that because we have cellphones everyone expects to be able to talk to you at their convenience.
Another quirk that we did not think of is that we now have separate phone numbers coming into our single home phone. Sometimes you answer the phone for a call that the caller normally would have expected your spouse to always answer.
The biggest change so far and a good one at that has been the $200 a month in savings. We can certainly use that money in a lot of other places. Also we have one less bill to have to worry about every month.
We don't have to be concerned about having the newest coolest greatest cellphone and we are excited to teach our children that you really don't need everything this world is trying to sale you and in fact you are probably better off without most of it.
God Bless
