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by kenned3 1485 days ago
I'm not sure you intended to come across as condescending but it does read this way.

"The major sense I get from Canadians whenever I arrive back is an enormous sense of financial illiteracy. Like they just don't know or care about how badly they get ripped off all the time on so many things and will never care enough to do anything meaningful about it."

First, that isn't what financial illiteracy means.

Next, It is very easy to write things like this but what are your proposals? you seem to feel they are being "ripped off", speak down upon them for not doing anything, but fail to offer any solutions.. very helpful?

Are they really being ripped off?

I lived in the US for ~8 years and used T-Mobile. i dont find the T-Moble price to be too far off my freedom monthly rates.

we LOVE to complain about the prices differences, but never actually show what they really are.

it is hard to provide coverage in a massive country with low population. California has more people vs Canada.

3 comments

>I lived in the US for ~8 years and used T-Mobile. i dont find the T-Moble price to be too far off my freedom monthly rates.

I pay Sprint (now T-Mobile) $20 total for two unlimited lines. Yes, that includes all taxes and fees.

Admittedly, I got a fantastic deal (only available for two weeks) for one of the two lines, got the other line as a free promotion also only briefly available, and then got the taxes/fees incorporated into the total when the account moved over to T-Mobile. But if I didn't have those deals, I'd pay $25 (after a group discount that's trivial to get) to Visible for an unlimited line on the Verizon network, or Mint Mobile's[1] $30/month for unlimited plan, or $20/month for 10GB plan (which might as well be unlimited for me, and probably 95% of others). My understanding is that nothing in Canada comes close to these rates.

[1] Canadian Ryan Reynolds as spokesman and part owner

You can shop for deals from USA to Panama, it's wild.

There is no reason to give the Canadian incumbents any more money.

Key for me is that since I don't spend most of my time in Canada, I need plans without insane roaming fees. Nothing like that there.

I would get into detail about what plans I'm on but it feels too much like dropping my own dox.

Again this is two separate phone lines from two separate countries which work fine in Canada, costing less than one Canadian phone line would.

I have only one specific proposal - ban banks from giving horrible financial advise by changing one letter. If you want to understand where I'm coming from it's this [1]

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/marketplace-watchdog-advise...

> it is hard to provide coverage in a massive country with low population. I keep hearing and I personally think it's a distraction.

Yes covering all of Canada would be very expensive because of the low population. But, coverage is spotty after driving only 30 minutes outside of a major city centre. And there aren't too many of those.