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Giving one-tenth of your income to support the church was the original form of tithing. Now there's a new tithe of sorts that relates to the cost of information gathering, communication, and electronic entertainment. You're probably spending—or investing, if you think positively in terms of your kids' education—$2,000 to $5,000 a year to support your family's infotainment. In a country where the median family income is $40,000 a year (twice that for college-educated professional families), these costs could easily amount to a tenth of your after-tax income. With the bombardment of infotainment offerings, you need to choose and spend wisely.

Broadband service (cable modem, DSL, satellite) is the underpinning of information access and probably the best use of your infotainment dollars. It's not cheap, at $50 a month, and despite the low quality of customer service, the speed and the always-on nature of broadband are addictive. (I'm an @Home customer being simultaneously transitioned to and shafted by Comcast as I write.) Add in the AOL service ($10 a month for broadband users) that you don't want to give up because of the hassle of changing e-mail IDs and that's $500 to $750 a year right there.

Then there are cell phones. How can you live without one in a mobile society? Cell phones run $30 to $40 a month for basic service. If Dad, Mom, and their teenager all have phones, they could spend $1,000 to $1,500 per year. There's also the cost of traditional wired telephones. At $40 a month, that's another $500 a year.

For businesses, two-way mobile messaging might also be necessary. You could think of the BlackBerry RIM two-way pager as being no more costly than a daily cup of designer coffee (that is, 2 bucks a day), or you could accept it as a $700-a-year service. The Ricochet wireless network provided 128-Kbps wide area networking for portable computers and PDAs in a handful of U.S. cities before its originator, Metricom, went bankrupt, but it cost $1,000 a year. The idea was too good to die, so Aerie Networks bought Metricom's assets, yet the service is still too expensive to thrive. The concept will likely catch on as part of next-generation cellular.

Fledgling subscription music services such as MusicNet, pressplay, and Listen.com's Rhapsody want $10 a month for downloadable music. The problem is, in some cases when you stop paying you can no longer play what you've already downloaded. I'd sooner put the same money toward satellite radio (Sirius or XM) or more cable/satellite TV music channels.

And there's more—much more: Cable or satellite TV ($500 to $1,000 per year, with multiple movie channels or seasonal sports packages), home alarm monitoring ($250 a year), in-car navigation and emergency assistance ($400 a year for OnStar with Route Support), car satellite radio ($150 a year), online bill payment (up to $125 a year), online gaming ($120 a year per game), DVD rentals ($240 a year for Netflix), online backup (up to $250 a year), online subscriptions and searches ($60 for the Wall Street Journal, $30 for Consumer Reports, $3 for a typical archive search), wireless Ethernet in airports (a couple of dollars per airport per day), and video games for the kids ($30 to $50 a pop). Polite magazines seldom talk about online porn, but lots of people dabble and pay. All these services can add upwards of $2,000 to your overhead per year.

To get the most value for your money, consider these tactics. First, don't rent hardware; buy it. Buy the cable modem once for $100 rather than renting from the service provider for $5 to $10 a month. Similarly, if you get a personal video recorder, buy the higher-end TiVo that rolls in the programming guide (or get the no-fees Sonicblue ReplayTV).

Once you have broadband access, use the ISP's e-mail and wean your family off AOL. Consider dropping extra phone lines you used for dial-up access. Instead of paying a dollar for directory assistance calls, search online through, say, the Google search bar.

Take a bye on the immature music rental services; for now, keep burning MP3 CDs. Shop for used video games, and pay no more than 5 cents per minute for land-line long distance (check out providers such as GTC Telecom.) See if you can get by with the e-mail paging available on most cell phones before you pop for a two-way pager.

What to do with all you've saved? Tithe it to a worthwhile charity.

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Copyright ?? 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in PC Magazine.