Lately we’ve been reevaluating our budget and our cluttered way of living. I don’t mean clutter as in dirty, just that we’ve got so much stuff. We’ve got some sort of shelf or basket in every corner or bare spot on our wall to hold.. random stuff. Starting about two days ago, we have begun downsizing. We just sold our huge china cabinet that was full of random knick-knacks, just because we didn’t have enough china-cabinet-type items to fill the shelves. We’re also selling our huge wooden king headboard because we already created a DIY headboard that takes up less space and looks cleaner.
Along with de-cluttering, we’re also looking to save money on things that we don’t really need. The first big thing we’re getting rid of is cable television. Technically we had fiber-optic tv, but you get the gist. We are keeping our internet, but trying to push for our promotional rate that they never gave us when we signed up. It would bring our internet bill from $40 to $25 for 12 months, which will be past the time we plan to move (again). By getting rid of cable, we rid ourselves of an $80 bill per month.
In place of cable, we’ve purchased a small personal computer to put in our entertainment center. We will pay for Netflix streaming ($7.99/m) and Hulu Plus ($7.99/m) and stream off the PC, which is already tied into our receiver and surround sound. We also have an antenna so that we receive the local channels. The money we’ve spent will be paid off in 6 months or less. After those 6 months, our bill drops drastically.
Currently we have:
At&t Uverse Cable & Internet package: $120/m
We will soon have:
Netflix: $8/m
Hulu Plus: $8/m
Uverse 12mbps: $25/m
Total: $41/m
That’s a savings of $79 per month.
We paid about $350 for the PC, so it’ll be paid off in about 5 months with that difference. Starting in 5 months, we will be saving almost $1,000 per year.
People complain about Netflix raising prices or Hulu Plus costing money. How about how much your cable company is ripping you off?
Hmm, we did this same thing but I’ve never really thought about the savings. We used to pay about $130/month for satellite, but when we moved into this new place our commitment was ending and we just decided to get rid of it. We bought an HD OTA and we get NBC, CBS, CW, ABC, FOX, ION, ION Life and Qubo in HD. AS well we have a netbook in our entertainment center which we use specifically for Netflix and watching TV. We already had the spare netbook, the OTA was $35 and Netflix was $10/month, in the last 6 months we saved $685. That’s crazy! Going forward with Netflix streaming only being $7 we’ll be saving $1476/year.
$130 JUST for Satellite or for internet as well? That’s pretty ridiculous! I am looking forward to not being so dependent on cable. We don’t watch a whole lot of TV anyways, and I already catch shows on Hulu a lot, so I don’t think it’ll be too different.
Well done on the money saved! That’s amazing!
Yeah, we don’t have cable either. We just have the internet. Hulu and Netflix actually aren’t available in New Zealand, though, so we are out of luck. The internet sustains us for now. There is plenty to do and we have a projector to hook up if we want to watch things. The local dvd rental place is pretty cheap, too so that is our Netflix equivalent I suppose if we want to splurge – we do it the old fashioned way.
Sep 23, 2011 • 08:49 am