How Vonage saved me money overseas
(This may sound like a commercial for Vonage, but it’s not. It’s seriously just my own story)
I used to be a Vonage customer for about 6 years, but after a couple years of not using many minutes, I decided to just cancel it.
Fast forward to now where I’ve been working from home almost every day for the last 6 months. Without a home phone, and only my work cellphone, I’ve been using twice as many minutes allotted per month. I needed a home phone.
I checked with Comcast for a Triple Play deal, but to keep my same channels and get unlimited phone calls, I would have to upgrade to a more expensive cable plan. In the end, with Vonage, I’m saving about $75 in the first year, and $120 for each subsequent year compared to their best deal. And Verizon Fios wasn’t any better unless I wanted to sign a contract for 2 years. There’s no contract with Vonage.
Why not just Skype?
Ok, I’ve never Skyped and being in the IT field, you would think I would know more about it, but honestly I don’t know anything about Skyping. Plus, I don’t want to bother setting up a time to call someone else who uses Skype just to get a free call or whatever. Plus, this is work, not play, and I need something more professional, so I opted for VOIP (i.e. Vonage).
We’re sitting on a time bomb…
We’ve owned our house for about 8 years now, but the last owners put in some major renovations about 6 years before we bought it. That adds up to 14 years, and you know what starts happening when a house gets 15-20 years old? Stuff starts breaking and failing.
Why would I say that? Well, there’s some particulars to our home, but in general there’s a lifetime to certain appliances, etc. such as:
- Water Heaters: 10-11 years. We have 2 water heaters. One (gas) is about 15 years old and the electric one is about 13. Both are well past their lifespan.
- Dishwashers: 9-10 years. Ours is about 9 years old now.
- Carpet: 10 years. We have 3 rooms where we haven’t replaced yet and all are at least 14 years old and have had pets and most likely smokers on them. Two rooms have original hardwood underneath, but we don’t know the quality and I’d rather just replace with the same Pergo floor as the rest of the house.
- Fridge: about 13 years. Ours is about 9 years, but I’ve already replaced a lot of parts on it myself so I’m not sure how long it will last ultimately. I know it was an expensive fridge when they bought it based on the receipt, but that doesn’t mean it’s reliable.
- Clothes washer: 10 years. Ours is probably 14 years or older. The knob broke off years ago, but we’ve been resourceful and use pliers to start it up.
How you know your electric water heater is dying
As some of my long-time readers know, we have 2 water heaters in our home thanks to the prior owners. One is a 40 gallon gas water heater upstairs that is for everything except the “new” bathroom the added. The 2nd bathroom has its own 30 gallon electric water heater. Why? I don’t know, but it has been convenient when we have a lot of guests visiting and needing showers at the same time.
You may also recall that we each have “our own” bathrooms. The gas-heated one is mine and the electric one is hers.
When my wife started to seriously complain that her showers weren’t staying hot, then I started to listen. I knew the heater was going on 13 years old, but I didn’t know how long water heaters lasted. Well I do now.
Luckily, we have an expert handyman in our family (her father), and he told me what to check on the heater to see if something what broken.
Some basics about your electric water heater
I’m not going to try to come across as any expert, but here’s what I was instructed about our water heater plus some things I learned later:
- It has 2 heating elements: one on top and one on the bottom
- If you want to check whether the heating element is broken, you need an Ohm reader (Multimeter
) to test the current. Multimeters are also good to test electrical sockets, such as voltage, whether they’re alive or not, etc.
Why I don’t tithe (in the traditional sense)
Tithe Definition from Dictionary.com:
tithe [tahyth] noun, verb, tithed, tith·ing.
I like to spread the wealth
While at year-end when I do taxes, I see that I haven’t given close to 10% of our income (pre- or post-tax) to charity, I think we’re doing pretty darn good. And each year we give out more and more. But I don’t like to just give to one place. I like to give to my church, to animal shelters, to rebuilding efforts, and also to friends and family (discussed in a bit).
What I learned from watching “Parking Wars”
(Photo courtesy of A&E)
If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been lately, I’ve been to Germany, working, been very sick and watching a lot of TV. You’ll be hearing about a few of them in my upcoming articles because, regardless of their “reality show” genre, I’ve really learned some good lessons from each.
The show Parking Wars airs on A&E and centers around the Philadelphia Parking Authority’s ticketing, booting and impounding divisions. Every episode has some type of drama, and it’s usually some citizen blaming the city, God, or just anyone except themselves for not following clear rules. However, not all the rules are logical or well-known, so I can’t blame some of them for their reactions.
Here’s just a few tips I’ve learned:
Learn to Read FOOL!
I know from living in the D.C. area that finding legal parking can be tough, especially when you’re not sure if you’re allowed to park somewhere, there’s a line of cars honking behind you and you have to pee like nobody’s business (ok, I threw in that last one). But when you find a spot and there are other cars parked right around you, don’t assume you can park there! Look around for ALL signs: on parking meters, on lightposts and poles, and walk up and down the street to make sure there’s no extra surprises. Sometimes you’ll find a sign 3 cars back with an arrow saying “No parking from x to y” pointing right up where you’re parking.
Cut Restaurant Spending and Learn to Love Dining In
(Guest Post by Shane of WeWearKhakis.com)
A few weeks ago, I was let go from my job. Since then, my wife and I have kicked into ultra frugal mode. If we do not need it, we simply do not buy it. While we have seen cuts in all areas, the place where we really noticed the cut was in our food spending. I was balancing my checkbook this past weekend and noticed just how fewer debits there were than only a few weeks back when I was working. I started investigating a bit and realized, all these cuts were primarily on convenience food spending.
A long time ago (about the time I had my first child) my wife and I stopped most fancy restaurant dining (as in anything more expensive than $5 footlongs). The dining experience was simply too expensive, the food generally too greasy or salty, and the effort of dragging a baby into a restaurant way too stressful. So we started eating in a bit more. Instantly, all that cash I had previously worried about finding to pay for diapers and other baby stuff emerged from the savings of not eating out!
But eventually, we started eating in more and more. The shift was partly due to the stress of dealing with our two young children after long days at work, and partly just laziness. While we were definitely not spending as much dining in on subs and sandwiches, carry out BBQ, or “Take and Bake” pizzas from Costco, we were spending more than we needed on convenience food.
How to Publish Your Own E-Book
(Guest Post by Allison Abel)
Like the Dude, my spouse and I found ourselves buried under debt and we, too, decided to blog about it. We opted for what we called Commando Financial Warfare (CFW) – zero spending on anything not essential for our survival. It has not been easy, but it has not been without its fair share of triumphs either. I am thrilled to say you can read all about it in my e-book called Get Out of Debt Now and How (!): One Debtor’s Very True Story ($2.99)!
Boy that sounds fancy shmancy, encouraging you to buy my book! Let me tell you how it happened. Over a year after starting my blog, I read an article in the Washington Post that referred to e-publishing as the next big gold rush (May 8, 2011,E-01). Add to that Amazon’s news that Kindle sales surpassed the sale of all print books combined and — you guessed it — I was seduced, lured, enticed, drawn, enraptured and captured (imagine hypnotic eyes swirling with dollar signs for pupils).
I’m gonna be rich! “Well the first thing you know ol Jed’s a millionaire…”
How our “big bank” and credit union both helped us overseas
Recently, we took a trip overseas to Germany for vacation. I was worried that we would get shafted on foreign transaction fees, currency exchange fees and ATM fees because we didn’t have the right mix of banks and credit cards.
However, after a few phone calls, I found out that we were in an excellent position for this trip because of the following:
Our “Big Bank”
I’ve been a Bank of America member for about a decade now, and while I was very close to killing my account recently from their attempt at a $5 fee for debit card transactions, I decided it wasn’t worth the bother. I’m glad I didn’t because one of the major banks in Germany, Deutsche Bank, is part of the “Global ATM Alliance“, and thus we didn’t have any ATM fees.
One thing when you’re dealing with foreign currency is to make sure you don’t withdraw too much because you might get stuck having to exchange it back to US dollars and paying another fee.
Your best bet is to use a credit card…
Our Credit Union
While we have a number of credit cards, they all had foreign transaction fees (FTF’s), which can range from 1%-3% (or more for some seedy credit companies). But while calling through our credit card companies to find out the best option, I found out that recently our Pentagon Federal Platinum Rewards Card dropped the foreign transaction fee! Not only that, but I learned that the card also offers 5% cash back on gas all the time. When I first got the card, it was 3%, but I hadn’t checked up on it until I heard a radio ad for the card and heard 5%.
Clever Dude and his bride started with $500k in debt and in just 4 years, it's down to $300k!