Last year I read this article about the many standard devices that are combined into a smartphone, and I considered getting one. As I shopped around, though, a scary fact slapped me–while the initial cost of a phone could be reckoned with, the monthly fees would be impossible.
Articles such as here, here, and here tell me that most of you out there with smartphones are dropping about a hundred bucks a month to use those things.
So how is everybody affording this? Whenever our water or power bills go up five bucks a month, we all complain about it until we’re blue in the face. Riots practically ensue any time gas prices inch up a penny or two.
And yet, sometime in the last several years, as smartphones have become as common as ripped jeans, Starbucks cups, and lower back tattoos, the average American just happened to find an extra hundred dollars a month to spend, in the middle of the worst recession in 70 years?
Where the heck is all this new money coming from? Where was it before you had a smartphone and you were barely making ends meet?
I want answers on this because, without someone showing me the way that the rest of you are making this work, I have to assume the obvious–that millions of you are ignoring your budgets and sinking yourselves into debt each month so you can have the coolness and convenience of the fancy gadget that all the other kids have.
