Save Money and Make Money by Getting Rid of Your Cable
It's New Year's Day, and last night I thought seriously about canceling my cable.
My wife and I watched the ball drop for fifteen minutes, and even that was a sporadic fifteen minutes because Dick Clark wasn't on.
The last time we watched network television was Thanksgiving, when we let our daughter watch the parade.
We very, very rarely watch television anymore.
The only use the television gets is playing videos for our daughter.
We have basic cable, which gives us about 15 channels, and none of the "good" ones like The Learning Channel, The History Channel, etc.
This is costing us about $20 per month, or $240 per year, and we've watched it only twice in the past two months.
That's a good chunk of one of our mortgage payments.
Lots of people pay much more; an "extended basic" package with a couple of premium channels can easily run $1,000 per year.
Besides being a fairly significant monetary expense, there is a huge opportunity cost for watching enough TV to justify this expense.
Conservatively let's say that someone watches 10 hours of TV per week, or about 500 hours per year.
(This is very conservative; Nielsen Media reports that the average viewer watched this much in prime time alone in 2005-2006!)Five hundred hours is enough time to put a serious dent into learning a new language, learning a musical instrument, getting a money-making blog going, learning how to sew, or losing a significant amount of weight.
And that's just one year!If you have twenty, thirty, or even fifty or sixty years left, how much better could you spend those thousands, or tens of thousands, of hours? Ask yourself if (a) you watch too much television, (b) your cable is costing you a lot of money, or (c) you have a lot of things you'd like to do but can't seem to find the time.
Any of these reasons are good reasons to scale back your cable TV, or get rid of it altogether.
If you're not watching it much anyway, then it may be a really easy decision to can the cable.
If not, give it a test run and try going without your premium channels or without your "good" channels.
Your wallet will thank you, your brain will thank you, and your family will thank you!
My wife and I watched the ball drop for fifteen minutes, and even that was a sporadic fifteen minutes because Dick Clark wasn't on.
The last time we watched network television was Thanksgiving, when we let our daughter watch the parade.
We very, very rarely watch television anymore.
The only use the television gets is playing videos for our daughter.
We have basic cable, which gives us about 15 channels, and none of the "good" ones like The Learning Channel, The History Channel, etc.
This is costing us about $20 per month, or $240 per year, and we've watched it only twice in the past two months.
That's a good chunk of one of our mortgage payments.
Lots of people pay much more; an "extended basic" package with a couple of premium channels can easily run $1,000 per year.
Besides being a fairly significant monetary expense, there is a huge opportunity cost for watching enough TV to justify this expense.
Conservatively let's say that someone watches 10 hours of TV per week, or about 500 hours per year.
(This is very conservative; Nielsen Media reports that the average viewer watched this much in prime time alone in 2005-2006!)Five hundred hours is enough time to put a serious dent into learning a new language, learning a musical instrument, getting a money-making blog going, learning how to sew, or losing a significant amount of weight.
And that's just one year!If you have twenty, thirty, or even fifty or sixty years left, how much better could you spend those thousands, or tens of thousands, of hours? Ask yourself if (a) you watch too much television, (b) your cable is costing you a lot of money, or (c) you have a lot of things you'd like to do but can't seem to find the time.
Any of these reasons are good reasons to scale back your cable TV, or get rid of it altogether.
If you're not watching it much anyway, then it may be a really easy decision to can the cable.
If not, give it a test run and try going without your premium channels or without your "good" channels.
Your wallet will thank you, your brain will thank you, and your family will thank you!