[weisan]

I am a cheapskate when it comes to smartphones and mobile phone usage/plans.

Found a deal at Best Buy two years ago with Unlocked Sprint-compatible Moto E selling at $30 a piece, bought five of them, distributed them all to family members and activated them on the "cheapest possible" phone plans (Ringplus, Ting).
Neither my wife or I consider ourselves "powerusers" at the time, so we were fine with not having the latest and the greatest, and having usage restrictions on our phone plans. My older kids (college, high schoolers) on the other hand, as most of you know with the younger generations, they are a whole different matter....well, since the old man is paying for their phone usage, they kinda have to put up with whatever restrictions we imposed on them. And we like imposing restrictions on our children to acclimatize them early to the real world - life is about compromises, you have to make certain choices, you can''t have everything. Our oldest daughter who is now in college, and started working and paying for her own rent/food, we still take care of tuition. She just recently upgraded to a Galaxy S7 refurbished and signed up for her own plan - all with her own money.

Fast forward to today....

My wife made a simple request to me yesterday that she would like a phone that comes with a much better camera. I know her, she doesn't make a request like this lightly. So with that, I have been shopping around and doing some research. I narrowed it down to the 64GB Moto G5 Plus which costs $269, almost pulled the trigger a couple of times on Amazon, Best Buy, eBay, still looking for the best price. Last night, I was at Costco and thought I would visit their wireless stand to see what is on offer. As it turns out, because of the number of lines (5) we have within the family and an average monthly bill of about $100, it makes sense to switch to Sprint Unlimited $20 a month for 5 lines.

As far as the phone upgrade goes...starting tomorrow, they have a buy one, get one free offer on the iPhone 7 for $550.

So, conceivably, I can walk back into Costco tommorrow and walk out with 2 brand new iPhone 7s, one for my wife and one for myself. As far as our kids go, we are still undecided whether all that upgrade (unlimited usage, new phones) is actually a "good thing" for them.

Should we do it?