Queercents

I just blogged about how much I hate my cell phone bill, and today I changed our plan and lowered it! We have U.S Cellular, so we have free incoming minutes. We also have free mobile to mobile minutes so talking to each other is free, and we have the free nights and weekends. When I looked at the confusing break down of our bill I saw that we use around 1200 minutes per month, and I wondered - is that 1200 anytime minutes? Or does that 1200 include just talking time - meaning all the free minutes too, and if so - how many anytime minutes do we actually use (being that we pay for 1,000).

It turns out that the 1200 is a total of all minutes. About a third of these minutes are mobile to mobile (free), nights and weekends are about a tenth of our minutes (free), and about 20% of them are incoming (also free), which means we only use 250-350 anytime minutes per month! My immediate instinct was to jump down to the 750 anytime plan, but then I realized maybe we could upgrade to a national plan. Read the rest of this entry »

I was adding up our expenses, and every time I do this I get so angry at how much we pay for our cell phones each month. Between the two of us our $70 plan adds up to $120 each month - that’s $1440 every year! What a lot of money just for the luxury of being able to text, “getting off the train, be home in 15″ or “where are you guys? we’re here,” or being able to squeeze a chat in on the bus or while walking on my lunch break - is all that really worth nearly fifteen-hundred dollars a year?

Before cell phones we did just fine. We managed to make plans and meet up with people as easily as we do now. Yes, we were capable of showing up at the agreed-upon time without exchanges of ‘almost there!’ or ‘I’m early, sitting at the bar.’ We were paying for landlines back then, but I wonder how much - $25 a month? I know incoming calls on landlines are free, and for most plans so are local calls. Would it be worth it to give up the celly and free up the cash? How much would I miss it? After all, I sit at a desk all day with a phone on it that I don’t pay for. After work I usually head home, but if I were going to make a stop and let someone know I could call before I left.

I admit I’d feel oddly un-connected without my cell phone, but I’m sure I’d get used to it. I wonder if it’d make sense for me to give up my phone and have Brittany keep hers since she’s not desk-bound, although her place of employment does have a phone if I needed to get a hold of her. What do you think? Could you do it? Is it worth it?

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Martinique Haller lives in Chicago with her partner, Brittany. She writes a personal finance blog with her two sisters, called Thrifty Sisters where they share their success with money.

It has finally become sort of uncool to buy water. Just a few years ago the opposite was true. You might kid yourself now, but bottled water took off because it was cool and convenient, and relatively cheap. Now, we all know better. All those bottles we throw away just sit in landfills, so the green movement has been hard at work to convince us to ease up.

Sometimes it’s not easy to let go. Sometimes you don’t want to carry around your big plastic water bottle everywhere, or you don’t know how to clean it, or if it’s leaching those weird chemicals. I was determined to stop buying water bottles, so I looked for reviews a couple of months ago. I found a great review on Slate. (click here for the review) What I really liked about this review is that along with evaluating if the bottles leached chemicals or if they were convenient, she also rated how they looked and if they would leak when you toss them in your purse.

As I scrolled through the list, I nodded an mm-hmmed at all of her commentary. And then I got to the last bottle. She says: Read the rest of this entry »

I had the misfortune of being diagnosed with thyroid cancer at the age of twenty-two. It was about 8 months after I finished college and I was first told to ‘have that looked at’ when I went to Planned Parenthood for an annual exam. I was in a couple month gap of not having insurance; I had graduated just long enough ago that I was no longer covered under my parents’ plan, and my own insurance at my new bookstore job hadn’t yet kicked in. I had gone to Planned Parenthood because they would charge me on a sliding scale for my visit, and at $6.50/ hour that was a blessing I couldn’t pass up.

However, ‘having it looked at’ would have to wait. I just couldn’t afford to go to a real doctor. I was twenty-two and despite a penchant for hypochondria, I thought it wasn’t very serious. But then a few weeks later when I looked in the mirror I could see something. I could visibly see something in my throat that wasn’t there before. I was scared. My insurance had just kicked in, so I made an appointment with my doctor. He took a blood sample and his plan was to get me to a surgeon right away for a biopsy. The surgeon did the biopsy and gave my mother and I the news and we were charged with making a decision quickly and for scheduling surgery in the next few days. It was serious and needed to come out. Read the rest of this entry »

How much do you spend on lattes? Perhaps your poison is it’s cheaper cousin; plain old coffee. Or maybe you think nothing of your frappuccino fix. You deserve it, right? I mean, after all - you’re going to work. You woke up early (like you always do), it’s Friday (just like it is every week), you have a meeting this morning (that’s so unusual). You get the idea. You always have an excuse. I’m not here to tell you to pinch every last dime, live like a Spartan and deny yourself those occasional sixteen ounces of joy - but let’s be realistic.

I understand when you’re walking around with a friend and you don’t want to tote around your reusable mug all day (though that’s not really so hard, is it?). But when you’re on your way to work to park yourself for the next few hours in front of a computer bringing an extra cup isn’t so much of a hassle. I realize we’re not all cubicle desk jockeys and corporate corner-office suits, and that some of you may have jobs that keep you running around. But if you can run around with a disposable cup, surely you can substitute the container in your hand for one from home. Just like I said about riding a bike, bringing your own coffee will save money, help you stay healthy, and be green all at once - the health, green, money trifecta. You think you can’t make your own beverage at home? You can’t concoct an iced latte yourself? I’m calling your bluff - here’s how to do it.

Read the rest of this entry »

June is here, which means barbecues, summer festivals, concerts, baseball games, picnics and pride. Yes, some pride parades have started to feel like a gay trot through your local yellow pages, but it’s a tradition so you go anyway. And you have fun. And you drink a lot. So many of the best things about about summer involve drinking. Friends meet for drinks, backyard parties are thrown, you lounge at the beach, and even brunch feels shabby without a bloody mary or mimosa. So it goes without saying that many people drink a lot of their summer cash away. So what’s the solution?

Many people associate watching their money with restricting themselves. They think watching money involves saying ‘No’ a lot, but it doesn’t have to. Here are my strategies.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve noticed in the past few years that saving money, staying fit, and being green seem to walk hand-in-hand like a three-way relationship that actually works. One of the simplest ways this plays out in my own life is on my bike. I’ve always ridden bikes. They were my ticket to freedom at age twelve because I could take them up to the library or the local public pool without my mother. As I got older, they became an easy way to solve arguments in a family of three teenagers by riding my bike to work.

As a college student in Olympia, Washington I rode to work and to the grocery store in the rain. After my bike was stolen in Chicago (because I was using a lock good enough for Northern Michigan) I couldn’t wait to get a new bike, and it took a year and a half. Most of my bikes were cheap hand-me-downs from friends, bought at the goodwill, or a repainted toys r us ten-speed from an adolescent birthday. Today, I have nice bikes - as does my wife, and we don’t own a car. Yes, I live in a city where everything is a bit closer together than in the suburbs, but it still requires a conscious effort.

The beauty of the money, health, green trifecta is simple when using a bike to get around. My commute to work is ten miles one way. If I ride five days out of the week that equals 100 miles a week and ten hours of aerobic activity. An hour of cycling burns about five hundred calories, and I get that exercise without having to plan any extra time into my day. It goes without saying that riding a bike means not paying for gas, car insurance, or car payments. Read the rest of this entry »

There are a number of ways to merge money, and a number of degrees of merging from ‘What’s mine is mine’ to ‘we share everything’. Whatever you do when you make a long-term commitment to your partner (poly people, as usual, might have more factors involved), you’ve got to do something, and it must work for you. The number one thing couples fight about is money – and it doesn’t matter if you’re as straight as an arrow or as queer as a three-dollar bill, the chances are that you and your partner will not have the exact same attitudes about money. The only way to make this work is to talk about it. In order to talk about, you have to know what your hang-ups and what your goals are, and you need to get your partner to think about theirs, too.

My hang up? I’m impossibly cheap at times. My parents raised me to be aware of money, but I have been known to take their lessons too far. I’m not ’screw my friends into buying me drinks’ cheap, not ‘bad tipper’ cheap, more like ‘never use an atm that will charge a fee’ cheap or ‘ride my bike to the box office to avoid the Ticketmaster’ charge cheap. My thrifty predisposition flows over into many decisions in my everyday life. I couldn’t share everything. There was just no why I could smile through an announcement like “Look at these jeans I got on sale for $75!”. Read the rest of this entry »