Member-only story
Who’s minding the Mint?
I’ve made the plunge and am switching to a low-cost phone provider with celebrity ownership.
Earlier this fall, I had a big car repair bill — I took care of it from savings, but it took basically all of my emergency fund, and it prompted me to look at ways to save money, including some things I’d been meaning to do anyway. I’ve already posted about becoming a cord-cutter — dropping my cable service and my land-line phone, and going all-in on streaming television. That has been working well so far, except that I don’t have all the local channels and haven’t been able to watch the World Series. But there’s plenty of other stuff that I’ve enjoyed watching, and I’m saving a lot of money.
The latest thing I’ve been looking at is my mobile phone/data service. I’ve had my Pixel 3 for about two years now, and I had already thinking about my options once I got it paid off. For a while, I toyed with moving my service to Google Fi. Google’s cell phone plan is reasonably priced, and the thing that really appealed to me was that they have, basically, free international roaming data, which would be nice for my foreign mission trips.
On my last trip, to Sierra Leone in 2016, I had purchased an international roaming data plan before the trip, but ran through my data faster than expected and had to parcel it…
