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I am not a
nutcase - I'm not one of those extreme couponers nor am I one of
those idiots who use paper towels more than once - washing them
and drying them and washing them again and drying.
I am a
self-employed man over his 50's who has started to realize that I
must run my life as if it were a business and to reduce fixed
costs where possible and to mitigate variable costs all around me.
A few months ago I
scaled back my cable television by removing all the movie
channels. Then after I didn't miss that
one bit, I gave up all of my digital channels and reduced my life
to just basic cable with one level above that.
And a funny thing
happened. I watched less television and didn't
miss anything that I didn't have.
And after several
months of limited television offerings (and me adjusting to
watching other stuff), I suddenly realized that I didn't need
cable at all.
What has been
eating at me up to that point was the fact that despite all my
attempts to cut my cable budget, I was still paying $57 per month
for television after taxes and fees and I didn't have any special
equipment to view the programming and I had limited choices for
channels!
My sister and and
brother in law had considered doing this and we all were talking
about this move this past weekend. And the more I
thought about it, the more I felt that I wasn't getting value for
my money. $57 per month is not much when you make $50-60k
per year, but I'm not even half way there and I need to make every
dollar count. If I cut $57 from a monthly expense,
that amounts to well over $600 per year in savings and that is one
month's rent right there at my fingertips that I can have in
reserve during slow times.
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I did some research and found that
I could get HD channels over the air with a $10 set of rabbit ears.
Since all television stations have to broadcast in HD, I was happy - local
programming plus some surprises were at my fingertips for free. So
off I went to Walmart and bought this set of "ears". I
also needed to get a conversion box to take the HD to dumb down for my SDTV
(my HD unit died and I'm not replacing it this year and will use my cable
savings to buy a higher quality unit with more real estate viewing
area!). Overall I paid under $60 for the hardware and hooked
it up, had the box search for the HD stations and suddenly I had 19 channels
of local and some national programming in very good quality
picture! FOR FREE!
I found an online television
program guide for free and have that on my laptop ready to review - plus the
box I bought provides programming information on screen!
With the quality better than I
ever imagined, I went to bed last night with my next item to start the next
day ... call the cable company and to cancel my cable tv.
As the sun rose and I sipped my
coffee, I called Cox and notified them I no longer needed them. Of
course they wanted me to stay offering me special deals and needed to know why
I was leaving. I told them that I no longer wanted to pay for
television. Silence. Then the lady dutifully
proceeded to sever my relationship with them and I made sure I still had my
cable internet which is extremely fast with lots of bandwidth for around $50
per month.
I'm looking into netflix and
hulu and other streaming services to provide some "premium" content
but I will do so on a budget and will weight the cost/benefit of the next
move. But I am now happy that I am putting $57 into savings
instead of into some big company's purse! And since I made
my first move, I am now saving over $120 from what I had been paying per month
for television - over $1400 per year in savings!
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