Posts tagged finance

AT&T’s DataPlus Plan Lowers Your Monthly iPhone Bill by $15

Unless you read Tech or Mac blogs regularly, you probably aren’t aware that AT&T introduced 2 new Data Plans yesterday. If you are a current customer, here are your options:
  • Do nothing and keep paying $30/month for the “Unlimited” data plan (which I believe actually has a 5GB limit).
  • Change to the DataPlus plan without renewing your contract and start paying $15/month for 200MB. If you go over, it will cost you another $15 for every 200MB.
  • Change to the DataPro plan without renewing your contract and start paying $25/month for 2GB, and $10 for each additional gigabyte.

Note that once you change to one of the new plans, you won’t be able to go back to the “unlimited” plan. To determine which option you should choose, you need to figure out how much data you’ve been using. Here’s how:

  1. Go to http://www.attwireless.com and log in to your account.
  2. From the “Account Overview” page, click on the “View Past Data Usage” link, as shown in this image: You will see a bar graph detailing your data usage over the past 6 months. If it looks like the one below (i.e. well below 200MB per month), then switching to the DataPlus plan is a no-brainer. On the other hand, if you’ve been using more than 200MB, but quite less than 2GB, then you can still save $5/month by switching to the DataPro plan.
  3. To change plans, click on “My Services” at the top, and then click on “Manage Features”, as illustrated below:
  4. Scroll down to the “iPhone Bundles” section under “Web, Text & More”. Choose your desired plan and click the “Next” button at the bottom of the page.
  5. Choose the effective date and click “Next”. I chose “Backdate to the first day of my current bill cycle.”
  6. Review your changes, click “Submit”, and you’re done!
“ Instead of paying upfront or taking loans with repayment schedules unrelated to income, students would accept an obligation to pay a fixed percentage of their income for a specified period of time, regardless of the income level achieved.
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Eliot Spitzer (yes, the former governor of NY) proposes “smart loans” for higher education in this Slate article.

Jon Stewart destroys Jim Cramer 

This is the culmination of a week-long feud, in case you aren’t a regular viewer of The Daily Show. Even if you did watch this on TV, the link above is worth clicking on. It’s Part 1 of the unedited, uncensored version. Here is Part 2 and Part 3.

The Crisis Of Credit Visualized is a superb animated explanation of the financial mess du jour. This project was completed by Jonathan Jarvis as part of his thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

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