Almost one year ago my Wife and I moved from San Diego to the Bay Area to be closer to our friends and family. While we were looking for a place to live we stayed with my Wife’s parents, who at the time didn’t have cable. For the two months we lived there we realized we didn’t miss watching television, so when we moved out and got a place of our own, we decided to skip getting cable. So now we are hitting the one-year mark without cable, and all is well.
There were a few tricks that helped us make the transition to a cable free world:
1. Netflix. Our Netflix.com subscription runs $15 a month and gets us 2 movies at a time. We can watch them over the weekend, return them on Monday, and get two new movies by the next weekend. This also saves us a ton of money versus renting movies at the local Hollywood Video, where movies run about $4 each. Netflix also introduced a new ‘watch now’ feature which allows you to play movies over your computer. I have my old PC hooked up to our television, so we can watch a few hours of movies a month that way as well. In addition to movies, Netflix also rents T.V. shows that have been released on DVD, as well as many documentaries shown on National Geographic or the History Channel. So that is another bonus
2. Major broadcast networks put there shows online. The best site by far is ABC, who has a handy viewer that even has HD quality shows. My wife often watches her favorite shows while I play video games, which of course is another way to fill some downtime.
3. Exercise. You get home from work, cook dinner, and sit down in front of the television to eat. After you’re done eating, getting up again to workout is now that much harder. So not having cable has helped us to exercise more, and of course getting out to exercise keeps us busy, so we don’t miss sitting in front of the T.V. every night.
In San Diego we paid about $35 a month for cable, so over the course of a year not paying for cable has saved us $420. It has also given us more reason to get out and exercise at night, more time to watch movies and documentaries, and we still are able to watch most of our favorite shows online. With all of those positives, I can’t see us signing up for cable again anytime soon.
0 Responses to “One Year Without Cable”