RMstudents Technology meets medical education

This is a post on personal finance inspired by Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich. In this series, I am documenting my attempt to put the techniques in his book into practice.

I was in a decent amount of debt a few years ago, mainly from credit cards and a car loan. It started a few months before medical school and tailed off around the end of my second year. At that point, I got a small job on the side, made a budget, and stuck to it for about 14 months until all of my debt was paid off. This was no easy task considering I had a fixed student income. After the debt was paid off, my budget-spending relaxed somewhat, but I was able to curb my spending enough to keep myself out of debt. I did learn a valuable lesson about being in debt. It’s soul-sucking, and I never wanted to be in it again.

Unfortunately, the problem arose again recently during the tail end of medical school, although not nearly to the same extent. My student loans only covered living expenses through the end of May, and my first paycheck did not come until the end of July. I built up a small amount of credit card debt from moving expenses and living expenses that absolutely have been curbed by the fact that I read I Will Teach You To Be Rich. I am also proud to say that I did not take out any residency interview and relocation loans.

After getting my first paycheck, I eliminated this debt by foregoing some savings for one month, specifically saving for long-term investing and pre-paying my student loans. While I am disappointed that my investments will suffer, I am happy that this debt is small enough to be easily eliminated.

I’ve taken a few precautions to avoid future debt mishaps. I started an emergency fund, and my goal is to slowly save enough to cover three months worth of my new salary. This is a bit slow-going at the moment since I’m simultaneously trying to save for a wedding during the next year. I also took Ramit’s advice and added a “Stupid Mistakes” entry into my Conscious Spending Plan. He recommends adding a buffer of 15% of your fixed monthly costs that can be used when you forget to save for or budget for something. I plan to transfer the remainder to a separate savings account. Every six months or so, I’ll figure out what I should do with the excess. I’ll probably transfer most of it to my emergency fund and spend a little!

I’m doing my best to stay out of debt in the future. Unfortunately, med school loans are my next major soul-sucking debt. If you or someone you know is in debt, suggest they change their behavior to get out of it as soon as possible. Give them a copy of Ramit’s book, or even just talk to them about their debt. Many people think they can’t get out of it. Others don’t even understand that it’s a problem. It takes discipline to pay off debt, but only then can you start to plan a secure financial future.

It’s strange to think that I started this blog 4 years ago. I designed it myself in the summer of 2007 and started officially blogging on it in August during medical school orientation. I based the design on the Default WordPress theme, which was in-turn based on the venerable Kubrick theme. Last year, after many years of updates, WordPress finally retired its Default theme with the vision of creating a visually refreshed default theme, which they dubbed Twenty Ten. The idea was that WordPress developers should design a new theme every year.

It was about the same time that I began to notice some of the cruft in my own design. But my design had a personality to it that I liked. Plus, the design took a considerable amount of work on my part, and this was neither something I was willing to throw away haphazardly nor something I had time to recreate from scratch in a more modern fashion. And so the cruft lingered on and got even cruftier.

Encephalosponge: New Design

A few months ago, a stunning theme called Duster appeared on WordPress.com. I knew this would be the theme that I based my next site design on. Little did I know that WordPress developers had the same idea, and they recently released their new default theme, Twenty Eleven, which is based on Duster. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to visually refresh my site based on a WordPress default theme that I love. In the new design, I wanted to highlight some personal changes that I’ve gone through over the past 4 years, and I also addressed some things I learned along the way. The timing is right, too, since I am transitioning from medical school into residency.

Encephalosponge: Old Design

WordPress has changed a lot for the better over the past few years. I’ve been able to keep up with most of the major new features, but keeping up with new features can be a time-consuming job. Now using Child Themes, I can customize my WordPress theme without altering the original. When I created my last site design, I basically copied and altered all of Kubrick. This meant that when any fixes or upgrades were released, I had to do them manually, which usually meant they didn’t get done. With a Child Theme, the Parent is automatically kept up to date without messing up the customizations that you’ve made. Additionally, many WordPress themes now include easy ways to customize the theme’s background, header image, link color and fonts. This provides an easy way to make your site look unique without having to create an entire theme. By adopting a well-maintained theme, I will also get the benefit of having new WordPress features added without any additional work. These themes are also generally designed appropriately so that plug-ins work well and so that they work across multiple operating systems and browsers, including mobile browsers.

Over the past few years, I’ve embraced Free Software and the Creative Commons. With my old design, I used graphics and fonts that were licensed under restrictive copyright terms. This made redistributing my design impossible. I now use a free computer operating system, create graphics in a free graphics suite and choose images that are free to redistribute and remix. For my header image, I found a macro photo of some Brain Coral that I remixed to fit my color scheme. It doesn’t have as much personality as my previous design, but it works well with my new, more reserved one. It is also easily replaced if I come up with something better down the line. I also use Google’s Web Fonts project to bring my design to life with open-source typography and not embedding my non-traditional typography in images.

My final revisions are a work-in-progress. I am refining the content of this site to be my primary blog, but not my primary online point of contact. I set up my own site on Blackhall Family Sites, where I would like to host a more appropriate bio, contact page, and stream of personal news. I will continue to use this site for blogging about interesting topics and I will reserve that site for information about me. I would also like to continue to refine the content of this site to a more narrow set of topics and types of posts.

So as the content of this site undergoes revision, I thought it was a good time for it to get a good facelift as well. The archive isn’t going anywhere, but I thought everything could use a fresh coat of paint and a good buff to shine. Let me know how it looks.

This is a post on personal finance inspired by Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich. In this series, I am documenting my attempt to put the techniques in his book into practice.

On Ramit’s recommendation, I have a Schwab High-Yield Investor Checking account, which offers a bunch of great features. One of them is “free online bill pay.” It’s funny because my old checking account also touted this feature. It was something I heard and promptly ignored. Ramit’s book suggested using this free feature to automate paying most of my recurring monthly expenses.

My problem was that I never really realized what this “online bill payment” service actually is. It’s basically a service that you can use to make payments to nearly anyone in the country without having to write a check. For some reason I was under the impression that this meant I needed to know information about their company’s bank account, and I had no intention of calling my utility companies to find out that information. In reality (at least with Schwab), bills can be paid in a number of different ways. Often times, utilities and a bunch of other companies supply their account information to banks in order to facilitate electronic bill payment services. I assume this is because it means the company then gets regular on-time payments. In Milwaukee, I can pay my Time-Warner Cable/Internet and electric bills this way, in addition to many other services that I don’t use. I just have to put in some basic information and my utility account number. However, you can use bill payment services to pay basically anyone. If Schwab doesn’t know the company’s (or person’s) account information, they mail a check that will arrive by the date you specify. So for example, let’s say that you pay your child’s babysitter $200 per week. You could enter her name and address into the bill payments center and then you could pay her using bill payments. She would receive a check in the mail on whatever dates you specify.

There are a few different ways to make payments. First, you can manually enter in a payment amount and payment date. This is obviously useful for bills that are for different amounts every time or ones that don’t need to be paid regularly. Second, you can set up automatically recurring static payments. This is really useful for something like rent. Enter your landlord’s name and address, and ask the bill payments center to make sure that your landlord receives a check by the first of every month. Since the Account Number field is customizable, you can enter your address as an Account Number and it will appear on the check. I just set this up for my landlord, and I’m truly excited about never having to worry about paying my rent on time again. Third, some utility companies and credit card companies can forward you e-statements and e-bills through the bill payments center. In this case, the bill payments center knows how much you owe every month, so there’s no need to enter it manually. You can direct it to pay all or part of your bill every month before it’s due, even if the amount changes.

CC-BY by Andrew Magill

Before I continue, let’s address the elephant in the room. You’re sitting there saying to yourself, “Man, it would be great to never have to worry about paying my rent on time, but I’m afraid I won’t have enough money in my checking account to cover the check.” I know this because I can hear Sadie worrying out loud about it to me. It’s a valid concern, but it’s not as big of a deal as you might think. The bill payments center has customizable reminders. You can use them with or without automatic payments. Meaning, you can have the bill payments center send you an email on the 20th of every month to remind you to pay your rent. You can then manually log in, check your account balance, and then manually submit a payment afterwards using the bill payment center. Alternatively, you can set up an automatic payment but still have them send you a reminder. The reminder would be your bank sending you an email saying, “Hey, we’re sending out a check in a few days for $900 to pay your rent. Let us know if you want to change that.” This would remind you to log in and make sure there’s enough money in your account. If you realize that your account won’t have enough to cover the check, you can also cancel the payment before it’s sent and make alternative plans for paying it. You can also make changes if for some reason your bill is different from normal this month.

Of course, if you use Ramit’s automation plan, you shouldn’t be too worried about not having enough money in your account. He advocates changing all your bills’ due dates to early in the month so that your bills get paid right after you do (assuming you get paid on the first of the month). But mistakes do happen and fortunately he also discusses techniques to get things like overdraft fees waived if you make a rare mistake.

I do worry about delays with the mail and postal service holidays, so I simply make my payment arrive a few days before it’s due. If you’re worried about automating something that could potentially become too big of a bill, like your credit card, adjust your payment if you have to. In the long term, try to identify and rectify why you’re spending more than you’ve budgeted.

This automation makes me genuinely excited about getting started with paying my bills. It also helped me understand the brilliant online bill payment system. This is going to make paying my bills much easier, and more importantly it will relieve the stress of always wondering if I forgot to pay a bill this month. My bills will be paid automatically, so I won’t even have to think about them. What a novel idea! This stress relief will be a major advantage during residency because thinking about bills is the last thing I will want to do with my time off.

Bills automated: Rent, Internet, and Credit Cards (Sadie pays for power). Anything that’s not automated is paid via credit card and the credit card is paid off in full every month.

Overall, I can see this system working very well for me. In addition to just being easier, the automation will help make sure that I never miss a payment. As residency gets more intense, it will be more likely that I’ll forget to send in a rent check one month or miss a due date for my Internet bill. Automating everything means that will never happen. Since we’re paid monthly, I am scheduling all of my bills to be paid a few days after I am paid. That way there is always enough money in my account to cover my bills. I am also finalizing my plans for saving and investing, which will happen automatically too. And finally I am finalizing my Conscious Spending plan, which I’m working on putting into practice this month. These are all topics for future posts though.

Do you have comments, questions, or objections about something I’ve described? If so, let me know in the comments!

It’s about time I start putting some of what I learned in Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich into action. In order to keep myself more honest, I plan to blog about my experiences. If that’s helpful to anyone, it’s all the better. These posts will come at various points throughout the year. They will highlight what I’ve learned and how I am applying it, challenges I face along the way, and my successes and failures. They will also include my commentary on how well or poorly Ramit’s techniques work and whether I’ve discovered any useful insights about putting his techniques into practice.

Aaronth posted a photo:

A bit larger.

This review is going to be inescapably biased. I read Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich a few months back. Since then, I’ve become very interested in personal finance, and I’ve been on a hunt for more reading material on the subject. A large portion of this review will be comparing and contrasting The Bogleheads’ Guide with Sethi’s book.

You may wonder, after all the praise I gave Sethi’s book, why I would even want to read another personal finance book. First, I wanted some resources to confirm the advice given in that book. More importantly, I wanted some more detail on a few topics that I felt Sethi’s book glossed over. In his book, Sethi advises average readers to invest in life-cycle funds. These funds do all of the investing grunt work for you, making them easy to use and maintain. You just keep adding money. He also advises the reader on how to set up personalized asset allocation and invest in individual index funds manually. He describes the potential for a slightly higher return by managing your own individual investments compared to simply choosing a life-cycle fund. Unfortunately, he does not give a lot of detail on how to distinguish various index funds from each other. I started looking for personal finance books that could offer more insight into how to evaluate an index fund. I actually found The Bogleheads’ Guide To Investing through Sethi’s book recommendations page.

The Bogleheads’ Guide To Investing ended up being much more than I anticipated. I was happy to see that it was not simply a rehash of the same information and ideals found in I Will Teach You To Be Rich. This book was something altogether different and yet written from a similar perspective. Bogleheads are a group of investors who have been influenced by John Bogle. Bogle is the founder of The Vanguard Group (an investment company), and he has been a long-time advocate of indexed mutual funds. Vanguard created the world’s first indexed mutual fund under Bogle’s supervision. Thus, Bogleheads are Vanguard proponents who believe in the advantages of indexed mutual funds.

This book is set up to be a sort of personal finance bible. It has everything from how to save money, how to get started with investing, why you should invest in index funds, and a lot more. The sheer scope of this book is phenomenal. It goes beyond simple personal finance advice. There were two chapters on tax efficient investing, a chapter on setting up college funds for your children, and even a chapter or two on estates and how to pass on your wealth effectively.

I am comparing this book to Sethi’s for a few reasons. One of the things I noticed is that they actually complement each other pretty well. Sethi’s book gives better motivation for getting started with investing. It contains specifics (with numbers) of how to set up a conscious spending plan (or budget) and it’s very task and goal-oriented. “This week, you should complete tasks X, Y, and Z.” It also caters to a fairly specific audience, people in their 20s to mid-30s. The Bogleheads’ Guide is built for all age groups. It talks about the importance of starting early and how compounding interest works in your favor. It gives advice for changing your investments as you progress towards and into retirement. It has chapters on saving for your children’s college education and even what types of insurance are appropriate for different people at different ages. It also talks about ways to minimize taxes on investments and how to pass on an inheritance to your family.

I can’t say that this book answered all of the questions I had about asset allocation, choosing funds, and vetting fund quality. I can say that I was pleasantly surprised by all the detail about retirement and education planning that will be useful in the future. But more importantly, after reading the chapters on asset allocation and getting started with fund selection, I realized that both books were telling me that choosing specific funds isn’t nearly as important as asset allocation and fund expense fees. In fact, I could picture Ramit face-palming himself and yelling, “Quit debating minutiae and get started already!”

While I liked both books a lot, there are a few reasons that I will likely recommend Sethi’s more often, at least to people around my age. First, I liked his motivational writing style. It instantly motivated me to get started. Second, while The Bogleheads’ Guide is very thorough and will be useful to me over the years, for someone who has never invested (or even thought about investing before), it would probably be overwhelming. Sethi also warns about debating minutiae (because it leads to inaction), and The Bogleheads’ Guide is full of tweaks and sometimes unnecessary details that could precipitate this inactivity.

Overall, I did like the book a lot, and it’s one I will definitely be keeping around for future reference. If you’re young and looking to get a handle on your personal finances, I recommend you start with I Will Teach You To Be Rich. If you’re older than 40 or you just want some more detail than Sethi has to offer, The Bogleheads’ Guide is an excellent choice. Just don’t forget to put things into action right away! Remember Ramit’s 85% solution. It’s better to be 85% of the way right and actually doing something than be 0% right by doing nothing. Don’t become paralyzed by the fear of making a mistake. Doing nothing is the mistake.

4.5/5

Aaronth posted a photo:

A bit larger.

Aaronth posted a photo:

A bit larger.

Aaronth posted a photo:

A bit larger.

Ubuntu’s built-in messaging application is called Empathy. Messaging in Ubuntu is great for a lot of reasons. In fact, I could write a whole post on it. I know that because I almost just did. Then, I remembered that the point of this series isn’t to evangelize an application. It’s about my computer making me feel an emotion.

I’ll be the first to admit that web-based messaging like Google Chat and Facebook Chat are extremely convenient. It allows instant communcation no matter what computer you’re on. It facilitates context-based conversations (“Hey, let’s chat about this email”). But do you know what annoys me? It’s when I’m in the middle of writing a blog post and I hear the “ding” of an instant message. Now, I have to go figure out where it came from. It’s not just that it interrupts my work. Often I want to chat. The problem is that I’m usually in the middle of something else, in this case writing a blog post. Now I have to switch tabs every few seconds to keep up with the conversation. And if I get a Google Chat and a Facebook Chat going at the same time? Oh, save me now!

Despite the convenience of web-based messaging, their chats are constrained. You’re stuck with a little box on a website. Am I in prison? If I switch contexts, I constantly have to come back to that site to continue the conversation. Are we playing telephone? I want direct communication with people, and I want my chat to have its own window.

Ubuntu can empathize. It has messaging built right into it. I’ve already mentioned its slick notifications. It also lets me chat on a bunch of different networks (Google, Facebook, AIM, Yahoo!, etc.) with one application. Messaging is nicely integrated into Ubuntu, much like music. Empathy nestles itself quietly into the “Messaging menu” (envelope icon), where it waits until I need it (or until someone needs me!). It’s easy to change my chat status to “Busy” or “Away” across multilple networks with the “Me menu,” whose icon looks like a speech bubble. In other words, when people chat with me on Ubuntu, it feels like a natural part of my computer, not just some website I have open.

All of the little details are great, but today Ubuntu made me happy because it lets people chat with me on my computer, not on a website.

Aaronth posted a photo:

A bit Larger.

Aaronth posted a photo:

A bit Larger.

Ubuntu is built by a large number of people from a wide variety of backgrounds. A company called Canonical funds a significant portion of Ubuntu’s development, but a large community of volunteers also contribute to it. These groups of people with varying interests and skill sets come together to create something great. The community of Ubuntu users and developers is vast, and despite some misconceptions you may have, you don’t really need to know anything about programming (or even computers!) to contribute to Ubuntu.

As an example, community photographers contribute their work. For each new release, which come every six months, the design team asks for photograph submissions on Flickr. They sort through a plethora of excellent candidates and include 17 new photo wallpapers with each Ubuntu release. For people like me who always love them all, they also have a “wallpaper slide show” that changes the wallpaper photo a few times per day. This way I can experience all of the photos without having to choose, and I constantly have a fresh new wallpaper to see.

When I first start my computer or when I get everything else out of my way, I want to have something sleek and refreshing to look at. Ubuntu made me a happy because it gives me beautiful photographs for my desktop wallpaper. [Larger individual photos]

Ubuntu is good at staying out of my way. The last thing I need when I’m writing an important email is something popping up and breaking my concentration by saying “You should install this update (or tell me you’ll do it later).” When I’m working, I want to work. I don’t want my computer creating distractions for me. For this reason, when it’s time to install some updates Ubuntu’s Update Manager always starts behind all of your running applications. It’s there to remind you to update, but it never steals your focus. While software updates are important, they never require immediate attention, so I like that Ubuntu doesn’t nag me to install them.

Sometimes notifications are time-sensitive, and they require an interruption. Since it’s often difficult to tell which notifications are important to me, Ubuntu notifies me without completely interrupting me. A shaded box appears at the top right corner of my screen with a message. It’s there if I have time to look at it, but it quickly disappears and does not nag me if I don’t. If I need to click on something behind the box, it nearly disappears and stays out of my way.

As an example, Empathy, Ubuntu’s instant messaging application, shows me the contents of a new instant message without disrupting my work. In addition to notifying me, it also turns the Messaging Menu icon (grey envelope at the top right of the screen) a bright blue so that if I temporarily ignore a message I don’t forget to reply to it later when I have some free time. Also, I like that the notification shows me who is messaging and what they want. This means that I don’t have to switch over to a different browser tab or open an application to figure out whether it’s something I can ignore. Ubuntu made me happy because its notifications do not intrude on my work.

Aaronth posted a photo:

Taken while touring the Woodford Reserve Distillery in Kentucky on a rained-out climbing trip to the RRG.

A little larger.

Aaronth posted a photo:

A bit Larger.

Ubuntu’s music player is called Banshee. It’s really great. It caught my attention because it feels like an integral part of Ubuntu, not just another music player like iTunes or Winamp. When I click on the volume button at the top right part of my screen, of course I can change the volume. However, I also see a picture of what music is playing in Banshee. I can pause, skip songs, or choose a new playlist. And I can do it without having to fully open Banshee. Banshee itself may get mentioned later in this series, but for today Ubuntu made me happy because my music player feels like it was built right into it.

During the development of Firefox 4, Mozilla added a button so that users testing it could easily share their thoughts about Firefox’s design. You could either click on “Firefox made me happy because…” or “Firefox made me sad because…” and share your feedback with Mozilla. This is a really user-friendly way to gather feedback about software. I liked its simplicity and the way it addressed an emotional response to using a computer. Humans are emotional beings, and let’s face it: computers can be frustrating. It taught me to pay attention when a computer makes me feel an emotion.

As you may be aware, Ubuntu 11.04 was released a few weeks ago.  It received a completely revamped user-interface. While using it, I’ve begun to notice the thoughtfulness that Ubuntu developers put into its design, and I would like to share some of the things that caught my attention. Not all of them are new in Ubuntu 11.04, but they all deserve acknowledging. This is an introduction to a new series of short, non-technical blog posts, usually accompanied by a screenshot. I hope you enjoy them!

I have now saved myself a full cellphone contract. Two years ago, I devised a plan to save myself a ton of money by overhauling my cellphone service plan. Last year, I reflected on how much I had accomplished and discussed some potential tweaks to my system. To recap, two years ago, I was paying $576 per year for a no-frills, mediocre phone plan with no included text messages. Last year at this time, I had reduced that amount to less than $190. This year, I have continued to cut my usage, and I am happy to announce that I only paid about $130 for my cell service. This includes 1000 prepaid T-Mobile minutes (purchased last April for $100+tax) and $26.55 for a 1-year Skype subscription. Over the last two years, I have saved $832 compared to keeping my traditional cellphone plan. I’d just like to take an opportunity to pat myself on the back. It wasn’t always easy, and I did occasionally use Sadie’s phone on the weekends, but otherwise this plan was a fantastic idea. A lot has changed over the past year and more change is coming in the future, so all of this could potentially affect what will happen to my plan in the upcoming year.

I’ll be the first to admit that as I looked back through my records I was surprised to find that I had not bought any minutes for my prepaid T-Mobile plan since last April. I just ran low enough at the end of March 2011 to finally buy some more. As I mentioned above, a few things have changed for me this year. First, Sadie and I got an apartment together in Chicago. I no longer make hour-long nightly phone calls to her. Although I previously used Skype to make these calls, there were always occasions where we would have longer conversations on the phone when using a computer wasn’t practical, such as while I was driving.

CC-BY-SA by echiner

A few things changed technologically as well. Not only is it now possible to use Google Voice with a free VOIP client, but Google has integrated free voice VOIP calls into GMail and the Google Voice Web app. Since I commented last year on the quality of Skype calls, I’ll comment on Google Voice VOIP calls today. They are not as clean as Skype, but they are improving. The call quality sometimes degrades, randomly cuts out, or even drops. This is especially true if I’m doing anything else using the network, including browsing the web while talking on the phone. I rarely experienced these problems with Skype VOIP calls. Overall, the call quality seems to have improved over the past few months, but it is still much more temperamental than with Skype calls. However, what it loses in quality, it makes up for in convenience. I almost always have a GMail tab open, which means that incoming calls now ring my computer and outgoing calls are just a click away. Plus, Google Contacts makes it easy to store and dial multiple numbers for all of my email contacts. This makes the Google Voice interface quite a bit more usable than Skype’s client. Google Voice also offers free text messaging, and messages are delivered to your GMail account just like a traditional email. Since my Skype subscription is lapsing in a few weeks, I find myself asking, “should I renew my Skype subscription or just stick with Google Voice?” I am leaning towards sticking with Google Voice because I can get incoming VOIP calls through GMail, Google Contacts’ phone number organization, and it’s free. Over the past 6 months I can probably count on my fingers how many calls I’ve made using Skype, so it seems silly to continue paying for it. On the other hand, it’s quite inexpensive, and it’s a good backup to have if my Google Voice call quality is poor.

I will also be starting my residency training at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee in a few weeks. Sadie and I will be moving in June. This throws a number of new variables into my (currently very efficient and cheap) plan. I don’t think my current minute usage will change much. I make calls to my family and Sadie using a mixture of Google Voice when it’s convenient and my cell when it’s not. I am unsure how much residency will eat into my minutes though. While I’m at the hospital for longer hours without frequent access to GMail for checking text messages or listening to voice mails, this will undoubtedly result in more calls on my cell and thus more minutes used. That’s not a bad thing; it’s just a fact.

There’s another interesting twist in all of this. According to our Program Director, anesthesiology residents at MCW get a free iPod Touch. The department started posting podcasts through iTunes U to facilitate quick reviews of common anesthesia topics between surgical cases, and the iPod Touch is their nice gift to allow everyone to access the podcasts. No one mentioned if we will be receiving these this summer or if we will have to wait to get them until next summer when we start our official anesthesiology training. Since the new iPod Touch can be paired with a Bluetooth headset and its Google Voice and Skype apps work over WiFi, this could work as a convenient make-shift phone at the hospital and at home.

CC-BY-ND by samantha celera

And then there’s the elephant in the room. Starting in July, I’m no longer going to be a poor medical student. Technically, I’ll be a poor Resident Physician, but at least I’ll have this thing called income. I keep wondering whether it’s time I break down and get an Android smartphone. (At the time of writing, it would most likely be a Nexus S.) Part of me says I should, but I still have some reservations. My biggest concerns are monthly price and value. Currently, I’m spending about $10 per month on cellphone service. Can I really increase that 7-fold? More importantly, will I derive enough value from a smart phone to justify the increased expense? At this point, it’s not really about the money. It’s about feeling that I’m not getting ripped off by my wireless provider. I’m not going to use many minutes, and I’m not going to use much web data since I’ll almost always have Wifi around. Ever since T-Mobile dropped their Even More Plus plan, I feel like wireless companies no longer care about what their customers want. I want to buy an unlocked, full-price phone and get a cheaper monthly bill with no contract. I want plans that have less than than 450 minutes and are priced accordingly. I really want a data-only plan with the option of adding on talk time. Instead, wireless providers are generally trying to keep you locked into an over-priced smartphone contract with a required, bundled data plan (usually $25-30/month). This results in people paying for a lot of stuff that they don’t use.

Then, I see people like Dave Pell and David Siegel who point out that too much Internet connectivity can disconnect you from real life. I have enough trouble with controlling my Internet time on a laptop, so what’s going to happen when my Internet is with me 24/7? So here I sit with my old cellphone. I’ve had my Sony Ericsson W810i for 4.5 years. The battery still lasts 4 days on a charge. After paying my dues to Cingular and AT&T for 2 years, my subsidized phone is unlocked and transferable to any GSM carrier by switching out a $5 SIM card. I can place calls, text, listen to music, and connect to my laptop via Bluetooth.

I guess I have some decisions to make. After reading I Will Teach You To Be Rich, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about conscious spending. In the book and on his website, the author discourages people from passing judgement on others for their spending habits. When budgeting, after “paying yourself” by contributing to savings, he encourages consciously spending money on things that you value and mercilessly cutting spending on things you don’t. The goal is attainable because it doesn’t require people to consistently tell themselves “no” and it encourages them to understand what makes them happy and to do it as much as their budget allows. Now, I just have to decide whether a smart phone brings enough value for me to consciously spend my soon-to-be, hard-earned money on it.