I lost my cell phone in a snow bank about 2 months ago, and am tempted to simply not replace it. It was on a Virgin mobile prepaid plan and despite paying $0.30/minute and $0.20/text I almost never actually used up more than the $100/year minimum required to maintain my account. At this point, I have a $280 credit that will expire soon unless I top it up again; another $100 will reset the clock and maintain my balance for another 365 days.
The phone was originally just for emergencies because we often travel long distances to visit family, and as the credit built up we started using it more and more for convenience. Finding work-arounds for the conveniences is easy though, so now I'm back to considering it as an emergency phone. I'm a work at home Dad with 3 kids and my only hangup is, "what if I need a cell phone because there's an emergency with one of my kids?" Intellectually, I understand that "fear is just a chemical" (
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/08/23/fear-is-just-a-chemical/) and this "emergency" almost certainly won't happen, but there's still a part of me that would feel worse than an idiot if one of my kids needed help that I couldn't provide because I didn't have a cell phone.
Practically speaking, the most probable emergencies aren't that bad. For example, my middle child has a food allergy but his reaction is fairly slow and involves vomiting - not anaphylaxis - so we have children's benadryl but not an epi-pen. I often take the kids out on the bike, but I ride defensively and have promised my wife to wear a safety vest whenever I have the kids in the bike; in her eyes, the safety vest is far more visible than the super-bright rear lights that I was so naively proud to buy :-). Since the kids were born, the only "emergency" I've encountered was when my eldest child's school bus was 20 minutes late coming home. That was shortly before I lost my phone, and it turned out that the cell phone had no impact whatsoever because neither my wife nor I could even get in touch with the school and then the bus just showed up, late, all on its own.
I do have an iPod touch, and have been toying with the textfree app, figuring that I can use that to keep in touch during any solo-parent road trips, for example sending an update from a rest stop with free wi-fi. My wife's employer provides her with a cell phone that we use when we're traveling together.
From one perspective, the annual cost of $100/year isn't very high. However, when I add taxes and consider phone replacement, I figure the cost is closer to $200/year. I lost a $149 blackberry but would consider replacing it with a $99 android phone that would then replace my ipod. Plus that's yet another phone that ties up the planet's resources.
From another perspective, it would be a shame to "lose" the $280 credit. I've come to accept that the $280 is a sunk cost that I have no way to recover, and I'm comfortable with not wanting to throw good money (a new phone and another year's worth of minutes) after bad. It reminds me of a joke about a guy who threw a $20 bill down the hole in an outhouse because he'd accidentally dropped $1 in and it wasn't worth going down there for only $1.
Do you think I'm on the right track? Writing it out like this has already helped convince me, but any other observations or suggestions to beat the fear of an emergency would be welcome.