I haven't taken a look at plans in the past year, but a year ago I looked at all of the plans available to find the cheapest possible service for someone that doesn't have many needs. I ended up with TMobile pay as you go plan. They had a unique feature that if you put $100 on your account, the money would stay in your account for 1 year. $100 a year for a cell phone service is hard to beat. This obviously won't work for someone that uses their phone quite a bit, but it is perfect for someone that can mostly use land lines and wireless internet. It's also perfect for a child whom you want to give a phone, but make them responsible for their own account balance.

We run a small IT services firm. Small enough that "management" does a fair portion of the work. What we came up with is that every employee can choose whether or not they want to be on-call (with absolutely no pressure to be in our out of the schedule). We then scheduled the people to be on call without pay. If a call happened to come in during off hours, we would charge double our normal rates for the service, and the technician performing the labor would keep half. If you want to have the chance of making extra money, they you get participate. If your life is too busy to be on call: opt out. So far so good, but then we don't get a lot of calls during holidays.

If you blindly followed the vaccination recommendations that existed when my first son was born, and the doctors happened to use vaccinations that were preserved with compounds containing mercury (which was common as it saved the doctor money to buy in bulk), you would have give your child unsafe levels of mercury. The same people that defined the levels of mercury considered unsafe were telling you to give your kids the vaccinations that resulted in this unsafe level. Once this was discovered the government quickly discouraged the use of this preservative agent, but it is still completely legal. Most doctors were then made aware of the problem and asked to dispose of the vaccinations, but they didn't have to. They didn't want to admit to fault, but at the same time they created a government fund to help alleviate the medical complications of people who's children were affected. As a parent, I take umbrage to the attitudes that some have for parents that choose not to blindly follow the counsel of those whose motives might be suspect. As others have pointed out, your local doctor is most likely not a specialist and can only pass along his education, which he has received from the drug companies. Japan, after much research decided to not give infants vaccinations until the age of 2. They subsequently became the nation with the lowest infant mortality in the world. After continuing their research, they changed their policy recently to start administering vaccination earlier in life, but still none at birth. This is just an example of some of the information that a parent might me able to obtain on the internet. My family has decided that we will do vaccinations, but not on the schedule recommended to us by our physicians. My wife is blessed to be able to stay at home, so we don't have our kids exposed to daycare etc. Our chance for exposure is greatly reduced during their first few years of life so we wait until they are a little older to receive the vaccinations. Everyone's situation is different. If it ain't broke, don't fix it (and prevention should always be measured in terms of risk). It scares me when people (like John Edwards on his campaign trail) start talking about putting parents in jail that don't vaccinate their children when told to do so.