Why do you have cable? Is it so your children can watch their favorite shows? Is it so you can watch your favorite Prime Time programs? Take a moment to read this article and seriously consider eliminating cable from your budget if it is something that you can live without.
This is a guest post from my friend Tabitha who blogs at Saving Towards a Better Life. She eliminated cable and was very surprised to find that she doesn’t mind living without it. If you think you can live without cable, it would be a great way to add to your fund!
After my husband went through his second job change in a year for an even lower salary, we had to take a hard look at our budget. The only thing we had not cut back on was cable/satellite TV. We had the bare bones package, with DVR and an additional receiver – this was costing us $80/month. We had DirecTV and they have a great offer for those not sure if they’re ready to take the full plunge into no TV. You can “suspend” your service for up to 6 months. This is what we did – hoping that the no TV situation would be temporary until we got back on our feet.
Now, just because we aren’t paying a DirecTV bill anymore doesn’t mean we don’t watch TV anymore. Here’s how we survive:
Before we turned off our service, I DVRed a lot of my son’s favorite cartoons. Even though we turned our service off, everything on our DVR is saved (after all, it’s just a hard drive like in your computer.) We can access everything saved on it.
We turned our service off the beginning of December 2010, so when people started asking what to get my son for Christmas, I suggested several of his favorite cartoon series on DVDs. He has a suffecient library of things to watch and I don’t have to worry about him being inundated with commercials for the hottest toy, junk food or another TV show I don’t want him watching.
I still watch all my favorite shows on the network websites. I watch Grey’s Anatomy on ABC.com and House on Fox.com. Yes, I do have wait before it’s posted – some shows are posted the next day others run a week behind. Either way, it’s not the end of the world to have to wait. My co-worker that watches Grey’s Anatomy knows not to come in on Fridays talking about it – we have our recap conversation on Mondays.
One word: Netflix. For around $8 a month we have access to hundreds (maybe even thousands) of movies and TV shows. Eight seasons of 24 for me and every Thomas the Train movie my son could ever want to watch. Plus we can have out one DVD at a time. (Some movies and seasons of TV shows are available only on DVD right when they come out.) So we can have a movie out or I can catch up on more recent episodes of shows (right now I’m watching NUMB3RS.) $8 dollars versus $80 – much more reasonable expense!
So what about those things you need TV for, like news or weather reports?
News – is readily available online. I can even still watch my favorite news show, The O’Reilly Factor on the Fox News site. I follow Fox News on Facebook so I get news updates. Plus, I listen to a lot of talk radio.
Weather – I use the Weather Channel Desktop when I need to check the coming forecast. Plus, just about every radio station does the weather every 15 minutes in the morning so I get the days high and chance of rain – which is all I really need so I know how to dress.
So just because we don’t have cable – we haven’t completely cut ourselves off from civilization. It is possible to live without TV. And even with all the other ways to watch TV, now that we don’t have satellite service we watch a lot less TV. It’s not on just for background noise anymore which is peaceful and I don’t get sucked in to watching a Saturday afternoon marathon of a bad reality series when I should be doing something else.
And here’s her update:
We disconnected our satellite service at the beginning of December 2010. Which means we have been without service for 2.5 years! When we disconnected, our bill was almost $80 a month (when we first got it, we paid around $65 and over the years they would increase the package or additional receiver fee by a few dollars – I have no doubt that we’d probably be paying more than $80 now because I’m sure it’s increased over the last 2.5 years).
But if you take the $80 we were paying and multiply it by the 33 months that we haven’t paid it, you will see that we have SAVED $2640! That’s a nice chunk of change! If I let myself think about it too long, I get MAD at myself for all the years we SPENT all that money on satellite!
Eliminating cable is not for everyone and if you feel like cable is a justified monthly expense, than by all means keep it. But if you can find alternate ways to view your favorite shows for less, than why not save the money?
Elaine says
In our area (maybe others) we can’t access shows on A&E, AMC, or Bravo on the shows website unless we sign into our cable account and since we went with local stations only we can’t view these shows :( Is there a way around this….I know hulu but I have to wait until the whole season is over… I think cable companies are on to this.
Holly OHara says
What do you pay for the Internet? We tried to eliminate our cable but found out the Internet is more expensive if you pay for it without a package.