For as long as Joel and I have been married we have never paid for anything but “Basic Lifeline” tv cable through Time Warner. It was very limited, but also very cheap! I’m talking like $12 a month cheap. And that was about 8.5 years ago.
Over the years the price has gone up and the channels have gone down. For awhile, for some reason, we were only getting channels 2-13 and our cable tv went up AGAIN: with tax, $20 and change. I guess we’re suppose to get up to channel 17 or 18 but I don’t care at this point. We just won’t pay $20 to get so few channels and then even less of those we had did we we actually use regularly. The kids may miss PBS Kids, Joel might miss basketball during March Madness, and I will probably miss the news. Especially the next time tornado season rolls around. When the weather around here is threatening I become weather-obsessed. Must. watch. the. tornado. box. on. radar to. see. if. its. going. to. come. our. way. – kind of thing.
I called Time Warner last week and was told there are no better deals to be offered me so for the first time in our married life we cut the cable. We will save cut out that $20+ a month for tv (a savings of around $250 for this coming year). Which actually puts us back to about the same amount we were paying for the past year to have tv plus our phone and internet.
Last year Time Warner gave us a huge promo when I called to look into cutting the cable. That deal made me want to keep it on and make some other changes amounting to saving about $400 this past year. If you want to see what deal they gave us you can read it here at this post. By the way, I have no issues with Time Warner’s service. They’ve been just peachy and I’d like to keep all my services with them. But, you know… money is an issue these days and tv is a luxury.
Its not a big deal to go without.
Cutting the cable is of little inconvenience for us because my husband is a big fan of using the library’s free resources. We never pay to rent a movie. He just puts it on “hold” until we can get it at the library. We get books, videos, and music from our local libraries. So – we don’t pay for music or dvds except on rare occasions.
I know there are alternatives to having cable tv. But you know, we’ve gone about a day in a half now without and its actually been really nice! It really has been.
The tv is too easily turned on and left on for background noise. And why do I have to watch the news on tv? {I follow Fox 8, CBS and ABC on Facebook already}.
No more temptation. Time Warner took care of that when they upped the price. Again.
I suspect a year from now I will be writing another post about how our increase in either phone/or internet went up and either A.) how we got a NEW deal from Time Warner or B.) why I decided to leave Time Warner and what company I switched to.
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WE got rid of cable about a year and a half ago, for the same reasons. I loved the quiet after! We did get Netflix. For $9 a month, we get 1 dvd at a time and also get streaming, which has a lot of the pbs shows. We get to be pickier about what we watch.
Hulu is great. And if you have a flat screen tv you can buy a connector to connect your comp to the tv (you will need a spliter so you can still use your monitor also). This is what we do and we don’t really miss tv. The kids can even watch cartoons from disney and nick.
Tracy! Oh my goodness, I just THIS MORNING found a comment you left on my blog Facebook fanpage back in October! So HI! 🙂 Yes we did sit together at the MOB Meetup and no I wasn’t purposely shunning you by ignoring your comment. 🙂 Truth is, I hardly look at that Facebook page and didn’t know there were different ways to view it (“Just Others” is how I found your comment). So anyway…
We haven’t had cable TV in 10 years. We’ve been able to get 3-4 local channels through the rabbit ears, up until they did the digital switch over, and we had to buy a converter box to now only get THREE channels, two of which show the same programs at the same times. We get local news, and that’s really about all we watch anyway. We pay $9 a month for a Netflix subscription that streams through our XBox, so we can watch tv series (no commercials!), movies, and even lots of PBS Kids programs too. We decided a long time ago that we wanted to invest in having DSL internet and NOT in cable TV. We are now looking at dropping our home telephone, since we have cell phones. Not sure about that one yet but it would save us $30 a month. I know where you’re coming from!
we had that same “below basic” plan for years, too. then it was 23 bucks for about 12 channels(!) and we ended up on a promo paying 30 for more cable than we ever wanted. i wish you could still get the bare bones package cheaply. we’ll probably do the same shortly–once we upgrade our computer and can watch what little we want to online.
my sister gets 30 channels for free with a converter box, but in my area folks only get 2-3. not worth that $50, either.
to 2011 and less screen time:)