Extreme Saving 2 – Disconnect

Ok, so this one was huge for us. I could probably write another miniseries just on the ins and outs of it… But I’ll do a brief rundown for the purpose of this post.
 
We don’t have iPhones anymore. In fact, we don’t have phones at all. {gasp!}
 
You know what else? WE DON’T HAVE HOME INTERNET, EITHER!
 
Now, this did take some time for us to figure out exactly what would work best for us. But it wasn’t nearly as hard as we thought! And let me tell you, not having to think about whether this secondary appendage is vibrating in my pocket 24/7 is actually pretty amazing. We’re not by any means hippies, and we do have an alternative. But it is a far cheaper, more hands-off alternative.
 
The iPad Mini.
 

My husband and I each have an iPad mini with 4G (the newer one with Retina display), and a data plan (AT&T and T-Mobile have some great ones, contract-free). “But you still have no phone!” you say. And that, my friend, is where you are wrong. Ever heard of Skype? We each pay a few dollars monthly to have what’s called a “Skype-in” number, and calls ring right in the app on our iPads as a notification, which we just tap to answer. “But what about texting?” you say. Well, for our friends that are on other types of Apple devices and have iMessage, we use that. For those who aren’t, we use the Google Voice app (for which we have a texting number). It’s free. It works from everywhere. And we always get texts right as they come in. Now, technically, we could also use the voice portion of Google Voice for phone calls as well, and that would be completely free–but Skype is the most reliable thing we’ve found at this point for receiving calls. And if you only want to have to give out one number but use Skype for voice and Google Voice for texts, just tell Google to forward your calls to your Skype number. Works flawlessly. There are several other apps/services out there for doing voice and text free from your data-only device though, just do your research and pick what works best for you.
 
I know you may be thinking, how do you actually TALK to the person on the other end? Do you hold a giant iPad up to your head? Well, no. We each have a Bluetooth headset–our current choice is the Jawbone Era–and as long as that is set as the audio source for our iPads, whenever a call rings in, it goes right to the headset. And honestly… The iPad Mini really isn’t all that large, anyway. My husband doesn’t like using his headset all that much, so he just talks to his iPad like he’s on speakerphone a lot of times and it works fine.
 
We’re now actually in the process of doing away with our computer, as well. The iPad can do so much in general now, we have been systematically going through all the things we normally use a computer for and finding alternative ways to do them on the iPad. It’s really not as hard as you might think! Again, I’ll have to expand more on this in another post, cause there is just too much info to give it all in a couple sentences.
 
I could say a lot more about this, but in a nutshell–between what we had been paying before for home internet, phones, and data–we are now saving upwards of $150/mo on just that subsection of our bills. And we are not constantly checking a vibrating device in our pockets, so we spend a lot more time with our kids and doing things that matter. It’s a win-win!