So I’ve been droning about the hazards of smartphones for three whole articles now. Seriously gents – they occupy every moment of blank space in your mind, they are a portal to the lusty side of the internet and they can even prevent you from building the family environment that you intend to nurture (you being an Abrahamic stud and all). Despite all of this, some of you are still hand waving me and feeling like you’re cool trading those things in for great mapping solutions and mobile payment options (we will address that mindset in part 5, but for now I’ll just say “fine”).
This is my rebut. Get ready to kiss it.
I’m going to do what we at Abraham’s Wallet are wont to do: use your own pocketbook to get you interested in this convo. (That’s right! Your wallet’s on MY side now! Deal with it!!) So Part 4 of my series on smartphones is all about how much money you can save by opting out of the popular trend of smartphone ownership/worship.
I was targeted by an advertisement last week that particularly disturbed me. It went, “Hey you beautiful trendsetter! How are you planning to finance your next phone? Maybe we can help you with that (you SUCKER!)” My shock had nothing to do with my feelings on debt, it’s just that I hail from a era when a phone was something you bought. Cars! Houses! Education! (Maybe even a once-in-a-lifetime family vacation…) THOSE were things that seemed like they needed FINANCING. Phones, much like dates with my wife, hand tools, decals of middle aged asian men… phones were things you purchased with the money that you actually, you know, HAD. If times were lean, you got the one without the bells and whistles. When times are good, hey–go ahead and spend a hundred bucks for the fancy phone… you’ve earned it, Thurston.
But nowadays, we’re in a world where your phone can cost you a month of earned dosh–this strikes me as fantastically nuts. The newest, nicest iPhone is running at almost $1,500 right now. You can even buy one here and the measly percentage of your purchase that our website will receive will probably double our lifetime income from this blog. So we really are in a scenario where people are planning years ahead of time how they’re going to afford the device that has become the primary tool for navigating the modern world. But I have some wonderful news for everyone under 40 years of age. Ready? Here it is: this outlandish expense is optional!
Let’s say you compare the 2 year cost of ownership between a new iPhone and my favorite dumb phone (in the final installment of this series I’ll provide a detailed breakdown of how we structure all of this tech in our family, with handy links should you choose to emulate us). Here we go:
| iPhone | Dumbphone | |
| Purchase Price | $1,449 (apple.com) | $25 (new-in-box, eBay) |
| Monthly Plan Cost | $80 (at&t) | $25 (cricket) |
| Two Year Total Cost | $3,369 | $625 |
So selecting a dumb phone leaves you with $2,744 extra versus the smartphone. If you make $70,000 per year, that’s an extra paycheck – two weeks of your labor! And this cost savings doesn’t factor in everything that you’re spending on your fancy phone right now. Let’s say you drop your nice dumb phone and crack the screen. You just order up another one – $25 and about 10 minutes of effort down the drain. Let’s say you drop your $1,500 iPhone and, despite the $60 case that you bought for it, the screen cracks. Well my friend, add $329 to that annual cost of ownership! It keeps getting better and better!
Now let’s think about some of the tangential savings that occur when you opt for a very simple phone:
Side Benefit #1 – Adios, Impulse Purchases
Remember how we discussed that having the world’s entire collection of pornography always at your fingertips could be harmful for the man who intended to avoid such things? Well you could say the same thing about having the world’s selection of amazing products available for sale at any moment, right there on your phone, for anybody who’s concerned about their spending (or materialism). Think about the purchases that you’ve made on your mobile device over the past few months; for some of you, those will add up to a lot of money that you really never intended to spend. While most (but not all) of you will still have internet at the house, removing the mobile purchasing option forces a tidy little stoppage in the funnel. Sometimes you’ll get home and realize that you don’t REALLY need the thing that seemed like it would make your life complete just a few hours earlier. (Sometimes.)
Side Benefit #2 – Subscription Services Go Night Night
Apple Music, Pandora, Strava, iCloud, Spotify, Lumosity, Duolingo, Cladwell, MyFitnessPal… there are many apps (some of which are wonderful) that invite you to subscribe for a premium experience. Once you get rid of the phone, however, you no longer need most of these. Personally, I had $28 per month of subscription services that became obsolete when I made the switch to a dumb phone. Add $672 to that 2-year savings figure, baby!
Side Benefit #3 – Shut Down The Social Media That Makes You Spend More Money
Did you know that social media use (most of which happens on that mobile phone nowadays) has recently been shown to have causal impact on increased spending? That means it’s not just people who were intending to purchase some things and happened to also be spending time on social media – research has recently shown that spending time on social media increases the amount that you spend in an internet session, and it’s not by a little bit. The main contributor here seems to be a need to stack up well against one’s peers. More time on social media, unsurprisingly, increases the sense that you might need to up your accumulation game in order to outpace the Joneses. (The demon of comparison strikes again!)
As I mentioned earlier, I’m going to give you a full rundown of how I’ve structured my device life to realize these savings without totally isolating me from the modern world (mostly, it just isolates me from the parts that seek to destroy me and my family and my witness and my legacy). However, I will deign to tantalize you with This Quick Preview: I own an iPhone(!) that I use almost daily but… it isn’t connected to a wireless service (genius!). I also use a few smart devices in my home to protect our family from the constant distraction that our phones are made to create… (END OF PREVIEW Jelloheads! You’ll have to wait a couple more weeks for the details and purchasing links to recreate this technological Utopia in your own homesteads. So.)
In the meantime, I’m hoping that the evidence for at least giving the dumbphone life a try is beginning to mount. I won’t say that flip phones create The Ultimate Feeling of Freedom (in fact, I’ve learned that phones without keyboards are useless to me in the sea of texting millennials through which we all swim daily)… but I will say that abandoning the smartphone has been quite easy and has created AT LEAST a weeklong family vacation’s worth of savings for us. And on the freedom front – I left my phone on an airplane a while back. It bothered me for about 3 minutes until I replaced it for $25. Smoke on THAT concept for a beat. Who’s smart now!? Come at me dudes!
*Mark Parrett is one of the founders of Abraham’s Wallet. When not blogging for you here, he’s raising a family in Salt Lake City, UT and working as a financial planner at Outpost Advisors.
Let’s see, percent of the $1000 my Galaxy Note 8 cost I paid =0, percent of my $125 per month unlimited data and tethering plan I pay =0 (my clients have to subsidize that our they don’t get to hire me), number of impulse purchases made due to smart phone =0, number of minutes spent on social media =0,. You are definitely talking to someone else!
Thanks for reading Steve. My work also covers both of our family’s phone plans. They don’t ask what phones and plans we use, so we get the same amount regardless, and pocket the change. Thankfully, the financial benefits of smartphones came in low on the list (for me) of reasons why smartphones make life worse (see parts 1-3 for more on that). But for lots of folks, they will benefit a ton from the $$ savings of abandoning the $1k phones.
I miss my dumb phone. Basically, I was “forced” to get a smartphone because when I do communicate with family and friends via phone, its by text message. And, we had unreliable home internet for about a year. Since I work online, we used our smartphones mobile hotspot and data.
It got to the point that I couldn’t view most messages because of emojis. The entire message was unreadable if an emoji was included and I tired of telling the family that I couldn’t receive messages with emojis. But, we have some family friends that still have dumb phones
We switched from Verizon Wireless to Cricket two years ago to ditch our contract and save money. When we need to replace our phones, we look for refurbished models to save cash.