After owning our own homes for the last 37 years we have downsized and moved back into rent. There were many reasons for doing so, one of the biggest reasons was ever increasing maintenance and ever decreasing abilities to keep up with that or even do it.
Here are a few good things about the move. Our homeowners insurance was costing us $105 every month. Our renters insurance is $77 a year. We were never able to get cable TV in the country and satellite was more than we could budget for and the satellite internet downloads were much slower than what I had. Here we have 70 cable channels provided. Our washer and dryer were old, so we decided not to move them. The price of a new pair would have been around $1000 or more and when I read reviews of new machines they were not very good. Here we have a laundromat just blocks away, where we lived before the closest laundromat was 15 miles away. The cost of doing laundry so far here has run just over $5 a week (they have giant washers). I figured at $5 a week it would take 4 years or more to equal the cost of a new washer/dryer pair. That does not even figure in the cost of electricity to run them over 4 years or the potential of repairs to either washer or dryer.
The only downside so far is I still have my 5Gb internet data plan and I cannot find anything better for a reasonable price. I know there are bundled plans cheaper on internet, but they are slower than what I have and they require phone and TV which would run my cost way higher than what I have now. I stopped in a Cricket wireless store yesterday. I wanted to find out about their data plans. The salesman saw the gray hair and wrinkled face and thought he had an easy sale; I could see it in his face. He started with his spiel and I listened patiently through it. Then I replied, "I know you are saying the speed is 4G LTE, but how fast is the actual download here?" He got a puzzled look on his face and again said it's 4G LTE. I said I needed to run a speed test. Again another puzzled look on his face. I told him to dial up www.speedtest.net/ and run a check in the store. He did and had a 6Mb download speed. I told him thanks for his time but I currently run at 18Mb with my ATT. He then said his network was ATT. I do not know if he was calling me a liar or what he meant. I told him he may have a sub-net on ATT, but he was not getting the same download speed I do as a regular ATT subscriber.
Microsoft windows updates consume a big part of my data plan and I am not sure if windows 10 allows one to select what one wants to update and when to update. It seems that everything is setup to be automatic. My Chromebook updates in seconds and consumes little of my data plan. Windows updates seem to take forever and gobbles up data like a glutton. Windows seems to have more security and operational holes it their system than they can ever plug. I suppose if I had unlimited data that would not bother me as much as it does. I must sound like a commercial for Chromebooks, but I sure like mine. Part of that may be because I already used the Chrome browser, G-mail and blogger on my windows laptop so I knew how to use everything before I bought the Chromebook.
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