<p>I know. We live close enough (two miles) to the PBX and can get 3mb down which is more than we need for work and home stuff. Comcast has a monopoly in the rest of the town. If we didn't have Verizon/Fairpoint, we'd have no other choice but to go with Comcast and I think that Internet access alone would be about $65. Part of the formula for building wealth is to minimize regular expenses and maximize regular income - especially the type that requires little to no effort. I find that the wireless services, internet services, natural gas, electricity, water, you-name-it are always trying to increase monthly fees. And I have to spend some time reviewing services from time to time to keep tamping them down.</p>
<p>One really annoying Verizon ploy was their signing you up for antivirus, games and some other thing. If you clicked okay quickly through the web agreement stuff, you wound up signing up for these services with no way to back out of them. I called them up and they agreed that the screens were annoying. These services added up to about $18/month. But they had to have you confirm the stuff. So they called our phone many times to try to get us to confirm the purchase. They just got the answering machine. They sent a number of emails asking us to confirm and I just ignored them. Finally they stopped bugging us.</p>
<p>Getting back to the topic: we filled out the FAFSA and they gave us an EFC that was way more than any college charged in the US. Then they gave us a loan package. We had to fill out a form and submit it to decline the loan package. We were also offered a payment plan but the fee was way more than the interest differential. I think that the best deal in the financial aid process was being able to charge a semester to our Discover Card. I had about 2.5 months to pay the bill and got some cash back out of it. I had to bump up the credit limit on my card to pay the tuition bills this year. I generally like to keep fairly low limits on my cards.</p>