I’ve been toying with this idea for awhile, but with my upcoming move to our new apartment, I think one of the cost saving ideas I’ve had that makes the most sense is getting rid of TV entirely. To be honest, I don’t really watch all that much to begin with, and I have a Netflix subscription to watch all of the shows and other programming that I’d like to see.
It should also save me about $30.00 a month, which is a couple hundred bucks a year. It’ll also free up the short time that I do currently watch to do other things like, say, *ahem* work on a more successful blog. Sure I may still get the urge to watch the latest on Remergent DNA repair, but I can likely get my fix online and besides, everyone else I know has a TV! What about you? Have you ever considered tossing your TV?
on Nov 12th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Here is an interesting concept. Free TV. (well free except for the initial expense of an antenna).
Oh, and don’t worry, I don’t live in a glass house either. I have cable. Haven’t run off an antenna solely for some time.
Will probably go back to an antenna by adding a digital converter just as soon as I can talk hubby into it. Due to the ecomomics today, we really don’t have a choice.
We have all become so used to having “things” in our lives, we really don’t even recognize them anymore. It is just a bill we pay each month.
on Nov 12th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
oops. sorry for the typo ….. economics
on Nov 12th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Mjsw,
Obviously we’d still have our free TV as well. After some negotiation with the fiance I got us down to basic cable. I agree it’s easy to let monthly bills roll in, as they’re automatically deducted, without giving them much thought. Definitely worth looking into!
on Nov 20th, 2008 at 8:14 am
If it werent for my kids I would have got rid of TV years ago. I also keep it because it keeps the cost of my internet connection down. Totally agree that netflix and similar services is the way to go and will be the norm.
on Nov 28th, 2008 at 8:43 am
Far more than a money-saver, ditching the TV is a huge time saver. We swore off TV when we got married. I was just beginning graduate school, wife was working to fund our household (my Teaching Assistantship paid about $5000 per year), and we had both regretted time blown on TV while in college.
It’s a decision we’ve never had cause to regret, and it had unexpected side benefits (e.g., our kids were non-watchers until they reached the age where we could let them wander around the neighborhood and watch at friend’s houses, so they had no idea what the pretty colored boxes on the shelves in the grocery contained, and weren’t perpetually begging for stuff like we saw the other kids doing).
You have 168 hr per week to accomplish whatever you plan to accomplish, and passive TV consumption is about as poor an investment from that utterly inflexible time budget as you can get. Until you can acccumulate enough working capital to benefit from the expontential growth effect on your savings (rather than being financially blood-sucked by your debt load via the same exponential effect working against you) your income is constrained by how much of your time you can trade for cash, and the hourly rate your customers are willing to pay for the service or good you deliver to them. “Self-employment” is really “direct employment by customers with no go-between manager and organization to cushion your mistakes and laziness (or to harvest your diligent efforts with a big haircut from the customer’s payments for those efforts)”.
If you view the TV as just another competitor for your productive time, giving it up will be easier. The side benefits will become manifest over time.