Rural Living Headaches

When I bought a house back in May '07 I didn't really think of the location as rural. I am only 8 miles from work and 2 miles from the nearest convenience store. It takes about 10 minutes to get to the main commercial district with a Wal Mart, Target, Best Buy and all the usual big box stores. The same 10 minute drive can put you at the door of at least 30 eateries which cover most of the major world cuisines and every chain restaurant in the book. Our neighborhood is just outside the city limits so we are blessed with slightly lower property taxes, but still close civilization. However, I have found a few problems with our out of town location.

The first snag is that our water and sewer bill is higher than it is for city dwellers because we do not get these utilities from the municipal source. Instead we are a part of a community water coop. The rates are not exorbitant but they are about 40% higher, which makes for an extra $18 per month expense. I have also found that a monthly visit from the pest control service has been a necessary expense. In the city I never paid to have the exterminator on call, but just a little outside the city limits the regular visits from a large mouse, mole, snake, and bug population reminds us regularly of the not-too-distant history of our property as a cotton field. This amounts to an extra $35 per month bill that I failed to plan for when considering the costs of the new house.

The final, and most painful, added cost of our semi-rural dwelling is the complexity of digital services. Cable TV, internet, and telephone service are years behind what was available at all of my previous homes. The only phone service is old fashion land line from Ma Bell (at $40 per month with Caller ID and Call Waiting). The only television options come from the two satellite providers: DirectTV and EchoStar (Dish Network). We had been promised by the builder that the neighborhood would be wired for cable TV (with one provider available), but that has yet to materialize. I spent the first two months we lived in the new house making daily calls to the local cable installers to find out when service could be installed. Each day I got a different answer so I decided they did not truly want my business and picked the Dish ($81 per month including HD Service and Sports Package).

Next on the list is internet service. It is such a huge mess that could be its an entire post on its own. To make a long story short, AT&T does not offer DSL at the moment. The cable company will one day offer service, but for now it suffers from the same problem as cable TV service so all I get is the runaround. The satellite companies do not offer a very compelling product at the moment. Finally, a local company, sensing this market opening, offered a 900 mHz wireless solution.

I decided to give the local company a shot with wireless and was able to negotiate a reasonable price of $40 (plus tax) all inclusive. Normally there are high start up costs to buy equipment or an equipment rental fee for this type of product, but I worked my way up the chain and got them waived. After installing equipment in the attic and running a new piece of cable through the wall I was all set to surf the web.

Now I have telephone, TV, and internet from three different vendors; each sending me a monthly bill. If you add all of those costs up, I spend $165.00 each month for my technology needs. That is more than any of my other utilities (except natural gas during the winter). At my apartment I spent $99 a month for more channels, more bandwidth, and more features. Ugh.

Now, to make matters worse, since Dec 31 my internet connection has been down about 85% of the time. My wireless internet company had a series of equipment failures and network interruptions that has made it a complete crap shoot as to whether the internet would work or not. This is the reason I'd never go into the ISP business. Reliability is important for these services and so far my provider has gotten a failing grade. This month I've often had to scurry off to the library to try and manage my eBay auctions and post to Aspire 2 Wealth.

This poor quality of service has doubled my turn around time for shipping eBay items (which may result in the dreaded negative feedback) and forced me to cut back on my blogging too. Who knows, there may have even been a few loyal readers who got bored waiting for a new blog post and dropped me from their RSS feed. I can't imagine living, much less running a business, in the third world where I may or may not have electricity from day to day, and reliable internet connections are rare (if they exist at all). I didn't think I would have this type of experience only a stone throw away from the city limits. The whole thing has been maddening!

I'm sorry the posts have been less frequent lately, but in this case there is also a useful reminder about the consequences of rural services. Learn from my mistake and look into these types of things a little better than taking the word of a developer that, "of course the neighborhood will have cable and high speed" when you are in the market from a new home.

Please be sure to check out the archives and check out the rest of what Aspire 2 Wealth has to offer during this time of intermittent posting. Thanks for reading; wish me luck.