I always hated the thought of paying nearly $200 a month for all of our cell phones. Now that I am retired I don't need one as much but it is nice to have the convenience.

I used to travel around the country quite a bit but now that I am retired my world consists mostly of a five mile radius of my home which includes the golf course, shopping center and grocery store, taking my boat out in the nearby lake and visiting the neighborhood bar about a mile away..

It's all that I need and want at this stage but even in my scaled back lifestyle I want to be in touch but I don't feel like spending a thousand dollars or more a year to do so.

I found the solution on day while I was visiting my son who manages a golf course. They use an ultra long range cordless phone system made by a company called Engenius. With an outside antenna mounted about 30 feet high on the roof this cordless phone system costs no airtime or fees and works up to five miles, more over water.

I dropped a few hints and I got one for Christmas last year.

We placed the small, almost unnoticeable antenna for the ultra long range cordless phone on a bracket just above the chimney.

The Engenius phone is just slightly larger than a cell phone but fits in my pocket or in the golf cart glove compartment. I can pick up my own home phone's dial tone on the long range cordless up to six miles out in the lake on my boat in inside the grocery store two miles away. I get a good signal in the bar across the highway which is about a mile.

Now that I have the long range cordless phone I ditched my cell phone forever.

If I would have bought it it would have cost about six months of cell phone bills, but the plus side is that you will never have another bill.

If we go take a vacation, which is about once a year, I just buy a prepaid cell "Go Phone" and twenty dollars of airtime from Wal Mart.

One More Option

Another good option for living without a cell phone is a WiFi phone. These look just like cell phones but work wherever there is a WiFi connection. You can sign up for Skype and make and receive phone calls on your own phone number for about thirty dollars per year, with unlimited free long distance. See the resources below for WiFi phones.