hey everyone! mat and danielle here from exploring alternatives. in this video, we're going to talk to youabout how we've been living without cell phones for 5 years. it might sound a little bit nuts that we haven'thad cell phones for 5 years but it is true. before we sold our house and started doingall these big lifestyle experiments, we started off with some really small ones like gettingrid of our cell phones. so 5 years ago we decided we wanted to savemore money and we owned a house so we couldn't really get rid of that expense at the timeso we tried to think of other smaller ways
that we might be able to save money and ourcell phone bill...we each had one and combined it was costing us about $130/month which waspretty expensive when you added it up at the end of the year for us because our money wasalready pretty tight at the time. so we thought, let's just get rid of bothof them, we'll cancel them and see what happens. yeah, see how it goes. and then we'll set aside the money that we'resaving from not having cell phones and then at the end we'll start accumulating a littlebit of savings. and it was actually kind of a scary thingto do because we were really attached to our cell phones.
we used them a lot and we were really usedto having them in our lives. especially, i mean you were even crazier thani was. danielle couldn't leave the house withoutit. she had had a cell phone for so much longerso it was a big decision to make. it was kind of tough. i still remember the first day that we walkedout of the house without our cell phones and we just felt really naked. we just thought, what if we need to look upsomething. what if we need to look up the bus time for,you know, for us to get home or...
if we need to call each other to meet up. so before cancelling them we came up witha few different plans to make sure that getting rid of our cell phones would work. we decided that we would just get really goodabout planning and communicating together. so we would make plans and then let's saywe were going to meet up somewhere, we would have a plan b just in case that didn't work. ok we'll go home if we don't see each otheror we'll meet here. and basically our idea was that we would just...westill have computers and we have an ipod touch, and with those we can always hook up to wifiin cafes or wherever.
and we can still communicate like that andso when we make plans with ourselves or with people we just plan ahead of time and useemails and messages in facebook to communicate. and then there's always that backup like,if it doesn't work out, don't worry, no one's going to be upset. and i think just planning that ahead and knowingwe wouldn't get upset if things didn't work out because we couldn't text each other orcall each other. that just made it a lot easier. looking back we probably should have had thatconversation with our family and our friends because i think they found it really frustratingto have us just kind of cut communication
with them without you know, explicitly sayingthese are the alternative ways that we want to communicate with you. but it's been 5 years now and we're workingit out. we rarely need phones. yeah, now we're really used to not havingit. we almost never think about it. every once in awhile if we're trying to finda friend or trying to find each other we think oh, it would be nice right now if we had cellphones but most of our lives now, we've completely forgotten that it's even a possibility forus.
and it's been totally fine. and what's amazing is that it's...we calculatedthat it saved us, in 5 years, approximately $8,000 cad. which is a pretty huge amount of money. yeah it's pretty impressive how much moneywe've been able to save without too much sacrifice. like you said, we don't really notice it thatmuch anymore. and if we ever do need a phone we can usea pay phone or a friend's phone or skype. we've got all kinds of alternative ways thatwe can communicate and we'll probably make a video about how we live without a cell phonein case someone else is interested in that.
but we're not really trying to convince anyonethat they should get rid of their cell phones because we loved our cell phones when we hadthem and we can recognize how convenient they can be if you have kids or if you have a jobwhere you need a phone. of course not everyone can get rid of them. it's just...we just wanted to show you someexamples of small things that we've done over the years to help us spend less money andto have more freedom, and be less tied down by responsibilities like a regular monthlycell phone bill. thanks for watching this video, we hope youliked it. we want to say a special thank you to allthe people who are supporting us on patreon.
your support is helping us keep this channelgoing and we really appreciate your help. and give this video a thumbs up if you likedit and subscribe to our channel to see more videos like this.
