I use the iPhone & iPod Touch all the time at work. But I don't own one. I am very, very very careful about adding any recurring costs to my life, I won't even subscribe to a magazine, much less take on a monthly contract for a phone. But I've messed with the latest one and I think it's time to plan for it.

But how much to budget? We are strict budgetarians and if I want to do this, I have to have facts at hand to plan for it.

Here's my telecommunications costs:

$124 on landline + DSL 1.5/512Mb service. We have no choice there, there is no competition, we can't get broadband without landline and we can't get any other wireline broadband of any kind.

We have 3 mobile phones, all Tracfones. We have spent $678.28 since August 6th 2008 on minutes for these phones. That's an average of $67.82 a month, or $22.61 per phone per month.

That makes my monthly telecommunications bill total $191.82.

Now I think I want to add an iPhone to the mix. That would drop our Tracfone minutes a very little bit (I hardly ever use voice minutes, so far this YEAR i've used 423 minutes of voice - the bulk of the voice minutes are for my wife) but I'm a fairly heavy user of text messaging - about 400 messages a month (a lot of those are alerts and other automated stuff related to my commute.

So what I'd like to know is what to budget if I go for an iPhone. When I had the Blackberry it was always about $118 a month after taxes and fees for an unlimited data and text plan with 450 voice minutes. If the cost is comparable, that would bring my monthly telecommunications bill up to $309.82. But I don't really know what an iphone costs to own and operate.

Assume an iPhone, assume a fully unlimited data plan and a fully unlimited text plan. Figure the lowest possible number of voice minutes.

So the question: What's the ACTUAL all-in monthly cost for an iPhone 3G WITH TAXES a month?