Lazy Man and Money

Semi-Annual Subscriptions Review: Ooma and Comcast Policies Stand Out

by 2 Comments

Every 6 months, I like to review my subscriptions and make sure that things are what I expect them to be. Ideally, I would do this more often, but I’m Lazy, right? In the course of looking through my subscription expenses yesterday, I came across two that weren’t what I expected. It wasn’t just that, but each company’s policy stood out as something that I thought I should warn readers of.

Let’s start off with Ooma. A while back, I wrote about how Ooma gives us free lifetime phone service for $150. (Free doesn’t apply to taxes and federal service fees, which amount to around $3 a month for us.) That’s a tremendous deal. When does the deal start to lose its luster? It’s when Ooma automatically enrolls you into their Premier plan for $9.99 a month. I was careful not select any premier services when I signed up. Still, I was put on this plan without my knowledge (there may have been a small mention in the fine print somewhere). The really shady thing that Ooma does? They give you a 60-day free trial of it and then start charging you. So for the first couple of months, I was paying the $3 thinking that I was saving some big dollars over my $17 Vonage plan. In the third month, the trial ended and I was charged $13 negating much of my savings. I didn’t catch this for a few months. Shame on me for not checking my bill earlier. At the same time, it is pretty sneaky of Ooma to put someone in a Premier plan when they explicitly chose not to add those features to their account.

A quick call to Ooma had someone answer the phone promptly and they refunded me two months of charges. That was at least a pleasant customer service experience.

Next up, Comcast. I noticed that I had been put in a Digital Preferred package that was costing me $18 a month. It was a bunch of channels that I don’t watch. I was surprised to find a couple of months ago that I got the NFL Network, which I thought was on a higher tier. Shame on me for not realizing this. I’m not sure how it got added to my account, but there’s a reason why I didn’t watch those Thursday night games on the NFL Network last year, I had canceled it in the past. Again, shame of me for not realizing it.

I decided to call Comcast to get it removed. Navigating through the Comcast phone tree on a Sunday brought me to a menu where I could press 2 to upgrade my service or 3 to downgrade my service. I pressed 3 and they said that there was no one in the office that could help with it because it wasn’t during their business hours. I called back and this time selected 2 to upgrade my plan. Sure enough, they have staff on the phone working Sunday for something that will increase their revenues. I asked the representative to remove the service and to Comcast’s credit he did.

One more thing that I found when looking at my Comcast bill… I’m supposed to get HBO for free (they have it added and then subtracted out as some kind of promotion). Unfortunately my Windows Media Center with CableCard says that I don’t have an HBO subscription. It’s probably a CableCard issue. One thing I’ll need to keep an out for though is when that promotion expires. That will trigger a $20 charge for a channel that I clearly don’t watch. (However, once I get it working, I’m going to DVR everything in sight and save it to my 3 terabyte hard drive.)

Spending Money to Save: Focus on the Total Cost of Ownership

by 14 Comments

My friend Kosmo over at The Soap Boxers wrote an article that reminded me to write of something that I’ve been meaning to write about for some time. Many consumers focus too much on the cost of something now, and rarely take the long term financial considerations into account. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), is a business term for analyzing all the ramifications of purchase decision. Microsoft has used this for years to keep customers from defecting to Linux, a free operating system.

[Note to Regular Readers: I know you may already know this. However there are still millions of consumers who don’t. If you know someone who this could help, please spread the word.]

The Total Cost of Ownership of a LightBulb

Let’s start with Kosmo’s article: Is a $50 Light Bulb Affordable? The article shows the math of why spending $50 for an LED lightbulb will end up saving you around $75 over the life of the bulb. It doesn’t sound like much, but if you are as Lazy as I am, you like not having to buy and store a bunch of incandescent bulbs and changing them, while saving money.

This is a no-brainer to me. The only question is whether you prefer to save even more money by going with Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs (CFLs), which have mercury and require special handling.

I suppose there’s the small percentage of people out there who can tell the difference between the types of light. I would imagine that most of those people would adapt to it. Chances are if CFLs came first, incandescent bulbs would seem odd.

The Total Cost of Ownership of a Mobile Phone Service

Like the lightbulb, people focus too much on the cost of the phone itself. They ignore the more expensive component, the cost of the service. When the iPhone came out, I thought it was pretty cool, but I already had a smart phone that did email better (physical keyboard) had music, the web, and a bunch of other stuff. It was the Palm Treo 600 (or 650). The data plan cost me $30 a month. The iPhone evolved (even learning how to SMS photos), but the plan jumped up to around $80 for most people. That’s a large chunk of change.

For awhile I jumped on board the expensive cellphone plan with Sprint. For around $70 a month, I could use a Palm Pre. It was good for awhile, but finally, I saw the light and went to Virgin Mobile’s $25 unlimited data plan (it’ll cost you $35 now). I’ve got an Android phone in the Motorola Triumph. While I think it is a large step back from the Palm Pre, the mass market has spoken and they like Android slab phones. So instead of spending $840 a month on service ($70 times 12), I’m spending $300. Each year I save around $540.

The difference in the price of the phone is miniscule compared to the $540 I’ll save every year.

The Total Cost of Ownership of Landline Phone Service

Let’s take the mobile of the above example. I used to pay around $40 a month for plain old telephone service (POTS in industry jargon). When Vonage came out, I switched to their $15 plan saving me $25 a month. It was a simple subscription change, I didn’t have to buy anything upfront.

However, a year ago, I switched to Ooma Telo free home phone service, and it has been awesome. I paid around $150 upfront (I got a deal) and now only pay about $3 in taxes and regulatory fees a month for home service. Since I had to pay those with Vonage, I have saved the full $15 a month that I paid with Vonage. In ten months, I broke even. The last two months have been savings. Each year I stick with Ooma, I’ll save $180.

The Total Cost of Ownership of Fresh Water

Okay ownership of water is a weird one. I know a number of people who don’t own a Brita water pitcher. I see these same people buying bottled water. I don’t understand it at all. A one-time investment for a Brita pitcher is under $20 and the filters last months working to give you many, many gallons of water.

I get that there’s a convenience factor to bottled water. However, with just a little planning ahead, you can save your $1 very easily, and get a better product. What? A better product? Yep. Bottled water isn’t necessarily filtered or as pure as Brita. In fact, it is about the same as tap water. In addition, with the Brita solution you can avoid that whole BPA nastiness.

The Total Cost of Ownership of Website Hosting

I know most of you probably won’t care about this one, but it home for me recently. I had be running this website using Amazon Web Services, a service that is very economical if you happen to have some Linux technical skills. I didn’t choose Amazon Web Services just to save a couple of dollars, I did it because I wanted to brush up on some technical skills that had gotten a little rusty. It all went smoothly until my website was attacked. Then it started to take too much of my time to defend the attackers.

The solution was to move the site to WP Engine, a hosting provider that fights the attackers for you. This site is much faster now than it was before the attack. I pay $100 a month, where Amazon was costing me around $60, but it is worth it, because I don’t have to deal with any attacks. If something goes wrong, they are on it right away. In the past, when something went wrong, I would put on my Linux system administrator and spend time fixing it. Now I can use that time to write articles like this one. Focusing on my business gives me a greater return than the cost of the more expensive hosting.

Unlike the other examples, this web hosting one is more about me spending money to save time and using that time to make more money. Still, I felt compelled to include it as it is just the most recent reminder of spending more to save.

These changes don’t seem like much, but they add up to save you probably a $1000 a year or more. Do you have more tips on how to spend a little money to save more in the future?

Today’s Deal: Ditch Your Landline for VOIP and Save Big Money

by 1 Comment

Nearly two years ago I wrote about how you can get free lifetime phone service for $150. The product is called the Ooma Telo and it’s something that I’ve been using the for many months now. It is a great savings over both a standard landline phone and alternative VOIP services such as Vonage (which I had before I switched.)

Here’s how it works… you buy the hardware, and you get free calling over your cable modem connection. It’s essentially, what Vonage and Comcast charge monthly fees for… but without the fees. I need to mention that there’s taxes and E911 charges, but that’s true of any landline or VOIP service. You will end up paying about $2 a month, but feel good that the money goes to help the telephony infrastructure in the US. It is much better than paying $20 or $40 a month.

Normally it costs around $200 for the hardware. That means it can take 6 months or a year for you to save money from the switch. However, today there’s a special deal on a refurbished product on Woot.com. You can get it for $140. That means that many landline customers can start saving money in 4 months and Vonage customers in around 8 months.

At the time I wrote about this originally, commenters brought up that the company was new and untested and that it might not be around long. Well it is still around about two years later. At the time, I thought about their technology and I realized that their costs were minimal. Telephone over the Internet is cheap – millions of people talk for free on Skype everyday and have done it for years. Ooma just brings the Skype experience to a physical phone. That’s what most consumers expect, to use their own phones throughout their home. They can do this by selling the hardware, since they don’t have to pay for stringing phone lines from home to home.

If you are interested, I’d jump on this soon. I’m late to write about it, and it should have already sold out.

Hot Deal: Free Lifetime Phone Service for $150!

by 8 Comments

Free Phone Service
Free Phone Service
I got a heads up the other day that Amazon has a deal on free lifetime phone service through Ooma for $150. Before you jump on the deal, here is a little bit what you need to know. The Ooma Telo service looks highly rated based on the Amazon reviews. While the Ooma name isn’t exactly a brand like Apple that jumps off the page, Vonage wasn’t always a big name.

I bring up Vonage, because the device seems to work a lot like Vonage. You simply plug it into your high speed Internet and plug your phone into that. Unlike something like MagicJack (which does cost $20 a year), you don’t need to have a computer on and active to use it. That seems to be all there really is to it. You get free US calling and cheap international calling through your regular phone handset (my picture shows an optional Ooma handset which is not included in this deal).

Why jump on this deal? The Ooma device usually costs $250. It’s on sale for $200 on Amazon… but if you buy from the first link I mentioned, you get a $50 Amazon gift card for free. I consider Amazon gift cards to be very close to cash since you can buy almost anything (and usually at a competitive price). By the time you are done it’s effectively paying $150 (hence the title). You only have until December 26th to get in on it. They might go quickly, so it’s probably not worth waiting.

This is an offer that I’m seriously considering. Ooma has a very handy cost savings calculator. I currently pay around $17 a month for 500 Vonage minutes (more than I ever use, but that’s the cheapest plan they offer). In the first year, it says that I’d actually lose $46. This is actually incorrect since I’d be effectively paying $150 via Amazon rather than the $250 retail price. I’d be coming out ahead before the first year. And since Ooma is free while the Vonage bills keep coming, I’d be saving $258 by the end of the 2nd year. In the third year, I’d see $462 worth of savings. If I can save that on my very cheap phone service imagine what you might be able to save if you pay more than $17… and the savings would continue to add up for the life of the device. I imagine this device would live for a long time as well, since there’s no motors or moving parts.

There are very few opportunities to take a monthly recurring cost and turn it into a fixed cost. Getting them to pay off in the first year is even more unusual. If you can grab a deal like this… well, it seems like the deal of the year.