Transcript
Gemini (0:00)
This episode is brought to you by Google Gemini. With the Gemini app, you can talk live and have a real time conversation with an AI assistant. It's great for all kinds of things like if you want to practice for an upcoming interview, ask for advice on things to do in a new city, or brainstorm creative ideas. And by the way, this script was actually read by Gemini. Download the Gemini app for iOS and Android today. Must be 18 to use Gemini Live.
Ryan Reynolds (0:24)
Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. You know, one of the perks about having four kids that you know about is actually getting a direct line to big man up north. And this year he wants you to know the best gift that you can give someone is the gift of Mint Mobile's unlimited wireless for $15 a month. Now you don't even need to wrap it. Give it a try@mintmobile.com switch $45 upfront.
Gemini (0:46)
Payment required equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first 3 month plan only taxes and fees, extra speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited. See mintmobile.com for details.
Clark Howard (1:00)
It's great to have you here on the Clark Howard show, where is to serve you with advice and information that empowers you so you make better financial decisions in your life. I want to talk about one of the monthly expenses that there's a shift going on right before our eyes and there are things you can do today that will save you money. I'm going to tell you how your home Internet is like a hole in your wallet and how to close that hole. And coming up later. So I get a lot of questions from people that are more like complaints. Why don't I talk about train travel? Because I almost never talk about train travel. But there's actually improvements going on in the Northeast corridor, believe it or not, with train service and a few other places in the United States. I want to talk about that because air travel is actually slowing down while travel by rail is starting to speed up. So Internet connections, you got all the Internet providers? Well, when I say, oh, we got the cable monster that provides Internet, maybe on your street, your home, and then we may have a local monopoly phone company offering Internet and they're a little bit tweetly d tweedledum, they have been pushing higher and higher speeds, creating this perception in our minds that we need these faster and faster Internet services in order to do all the things we want to do in our home. What do they do along with that? They keep moving the price per month higher and higher. Now, particularly the largest phone company in the United States for local phone service, AT&T for home Internet through a phone company. Verizon's kind of behind them on that. And then Comcast, the largest player using the Xfinity brand, they both love to do these teaser deals offering you Internet, often at what they call one gig service. And then after a period of time, the price goes crazy and they hope for inertia that when it goes from whatever that teaser rate is, that you'll suddenly pay them a fortune per month for that home Internet connection. So what's become really clear though is that you don't normally have that need for speed that you're paying that huge amount per month for, in many cases more than $100 a month for that home Internet connection. Well, let me give you some reasons why you don't need it in many cases. First of all, in terms of buying it from the cable monster or the local monopoly phone company. In more and more communities around the country, Google is building out what they call G fiber. And they tend to undercut the cable monster and the local monopoly phone company by about 20 to 30%. But that's not the big savings. The big savings are coming from Verizon's wireless service and to a bigger extent T Mobile with the T mobile home product that used to be available in very limited places in the United States and now is so many others. And then the Verizon wireless version that is available in more and more places in the United States. And neither of these run at the kind of speeds that are the ones pushed by Google's G Fiber, your cable monster, or the local monopoly phone company, but at a much cheaper price per month. And the reality is the cable companies are scared and they are starting to offer slower speed Internet as a defense against the T mobile offering and the Verizon wireless offering for home Internet. And they're now offering speeds. A lot of times they'll have a promotional thing where you can get 300, it's called megabits service and one gigabit and at 30 bucks a month. And this is to try to fight back against these interlopers coming in to their business. And let me tell you, here's what you do, unless you're a gamer where you really have that need for the enormous capacity, you're fine at that 300, you are fine at 100 megabits. You can stream all you want. I can tell you something. We used to have a vacation cottage in a rural area and the fastest Internet we could get and there was no T mobile home there was no Verizon Wireless back then. The only thing we could get was from a local phone company that the fastest speed was 3 megabits a second. I mean, much slower than you get on a cell phone now for data. And you'd try to stream something and it would do what they call buffering. And the show, whatever it was, would just freeze. And you couldn't watch TV. You just couldn't do it. That's it. 3. Now we're talking about people buying bargain service at 100 or using one of these wireless services, typically at 50 or 60. You'll be fine. I'm not talking about price per month. I'm talking about the speed of it. So you don't need to waste your money. And all you do is you try one of these slower speeds at a much lower price. And if everything's working fine, paying $30 a month, stop paying 100 or so a month. Think about over the course of a year, how much money you're saving. And every dollar counts. Krista.