I need some perspective on a "spend money to save money" type question. I hope this could be transferable to something similar for others (i.e. what is a good payback period?)
We both broke our cell phones about 6 months ago, and they are starting to get on their last legs. Unfortunately, the cracked screen means they are worthless for trade-in and we did not do the insurance because we never broke one before.
There is currently a promotion with a new carrier that will drop our wireless bill considerably, but we will have to eat the remainder of the currrent phones (7 months). My concern about "buy a cheap phone on the old service" is that we pay at least $300 total for new phones (I checked swappa) and are still paying $65 extra per month. The other concern is that the new company is offering an extra $20 off the service and we are saving half off the cost of the new phones, so waiting for the phones to offically die could reduce savings by $50 per month.
The details:
- Old plan (plan + phones) = $190, new plan (plan + phones + insurance) = $125 (phones are $350 each when doing 24 monthly payments) - New plan has ulimited data, but we do not care (there is no other option)
- Broken phone payoff (total) = $620
- Our broken phones are selling on ebay for $150 each
- New phones come with Google Home, which we would likely e-Bay (around $80ish)
It looks like our "worst case" return is about 10 months and can be less depending on e-Bay success. What am I missing? Even my "stick with it" wife is thinking switching seems right. Right now we are in savings mode and I hate to fork out the money, but also want to save in the long run.
Thanks in advance
Submitted April 10, 2017 at 04:56AM by TiBikeNerd http://ift.tt/2ohpyfm
