I have text messaging on my phone, but I don’t have an unlimited plan. I pay 10 cents to send a text and 2 cents every time I receive one. I’ve done the math, and at this point, I just don’t send and receive enough text messages to make the unlimited plan worth it. For now, I’m content to pay per message.
Except now, I have started getting spam texts. Porn spam texts, of course. I knew that spam texts were common for people with unlimited text plans, but until recently, I had been spared the spam.
I’m not sure how the spammers got my number, but every so often, I check my phone and find that two or three new spam messages have come in. I have to pay for those!
Okay, so it’s only 2 cents per message. So the three messages I just discovered only cost me 6 cents. But this goes back to my hidden fees post – how many of these do I get over a period of time? How much money does it end up costing me? A dollar a year? More? And I’ve discovered that these spam messages were coming more frequently than they used to.
I’m not sure if I’m going to contact the phone company or not. After all, it was only 3 messages. Only 6 cents. Maybe I am overreacting. And it’s probably not worth my time to sit on hold for 5-10 minutes only to get 6 cents credited to my account.
But I still find it a little frustrating.
Megan is a 40-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:
In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance. It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information. It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck. While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.
While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.
Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.
So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan. I needed to budget. I needed to know what I was spending my money on. I needed to prepare for the future.
I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way. I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.
