It’s not like I have anything against cable or anything – I’m just trying to figure out how to save us a little money this summer after getting our latest electric bill that’s rapidly approaching the size of one of our car payments!!!
And yes, we did suck it up and turn the air up a few degrees in our initial response, even though it seems really hot around here, but anything helps, right???
I guess that’s why I just have to wonder if there’s anything that can be cut from the entertainment portion of our budget. I mean, we pay a lot of money each money between our bills to Bright House (cable) and Verizon (cell phones), not to mention also maintaining a Netflix subscription AND lately we’ve been hitting up the theater a lot because there are actually movies worth seeing up on the silver screen for a change! It probably doesn’t help that I’ve been working so much lately that I personally use almost none of our cable and Netflix subscriptions, mainly indulging on nights out at the movies with the wife when I’ve made sufficient progress in my mind to have “earned” a night off.
There have been a couple points where I’ve pondered the thought of whether we could just give up our cable package and switch to a pay-as-you-go service like AppleTV or Amazon or something, but I feel like the interface itself would be counter-intuitive about how I do watch TV when I have the time, and how my wife typically watches as well. We’re both big channel surfers, often times settling on just random, stupid stuff to pass the time (or in my case sometimes act as background noise while I’m writing), and so I’m not sure that it would be the same knowing that each crappy show is costing $2.99 a pop.
Another big problem is that our preferences really are spread out across all of the services, which prevents us from simply dropping one and keeping the others – most of my seldom TV watching is stuff on the movie channels, which we pay extra for and you can’t just get by themselves, and yet we couldn’t exist on Netflix alone either because sometimes I want to just watch something stupid now – not in a day or two. And yet we still like to keep Netflix around because it’s cheaper to use them for big name movies when they’re first released than paying $4.99 to watch them On-Demand.
Although admittedly the current disc at the top of my queue has technically been sitting here for a good two months now, meaning I could’ve just bought the damn thing several times over by now!
I guess I’m just picky, and the penalty means that I’m paying ridiculous bills to three different companies for the privilege each and every month. Anybody out there have a good success story about breaking away from cable tv without sacrificing selection?