Your Smartphone or Your Dinner

In monitoring your personal finance, it’s a good practice to routinely check up on your bills and daily spending to account for everything you spend money on. While most people are guilty of sometimes splurging on the less important things, like dining out or picking up an overly expensive pair of shoes, most truly high-cost spending all makes sense—groceries, housing, utilities: Your big expenses are typically things you actually need. But if you’re like a lot of people, your cell phone bill probably makes less sense, and you probably keep paying for it anyway. With the saturation of smartphones in the world of communication, cell phone bills in general have grown at an alarming rate. And while consumers may have balked at high-cost data plans at first, for many, these expenses now just come with the territory of owning a mobile phone.

Despite the fact that an average smartphone bill is 90% higher than a regular cell bill, people are still buying smartphones in droves, and the cost can be huge. In recent surveys of the American public, research shows that more and more frequently, consumers are paying their phone bills at an alarming rate, often surpassing the more necessary expenses in life. It’s normal to love your phone, but is it normal to pay more for it than for your food?

Graphic courtesy of AccountingDegree.com