Goodbye Cable

If you're just joining this blog, check out the beginning of the story to understand why we have made the decision to financially fast and therefore eliminate cable.

This week's financial journey revolved around finding the best method to eliminate cable, yet still watch the shows we regularly enjoy--at least some of them.  Our local cable-internet company has had great service but by removing cable--and therefore the bundle package--our internet bill was not as low as I had hoped.  So shopping around, we found a better deal for us.  Our rates will change after one year, so we'll re-evaluate then--after our year of fasting, we'll see what we really need and what we don't.

So here's what we've discovered this week:
(that's right, it's another list!)

• Almost all networks have episodes of their shows on their website.  However.....this would require we either buy a laptop or five of us crowd around our desktop computer.  We could (hypothetically) watch those internet shows via our smart phones or our e-reader tablet, but it would be very small and very grainy.  (And yes, we could give up watching our shows for a year.....or not!)
• You can watch a lot of shows through a streaming media player like a Wii (which we already have) or a Roku or many others.  You can then subscribe to Netflix or Hulu Plus for only $8 a month, and they have a gazillion movies and TV shows, some even have current episodes.  Or you could do regular Hulu for free with a smaller selection.  However NO ONE has shows from CBS--my guess is this is a CBS we-won't-play-in-your-sandbox issue, but no one seems to really know why.  Want to guess what network the majority of our shows are on?
• There's also this cool contraption that is a TV adapter thing (I never figured out what it's actually called!) and it allows you to use internet through your TV.  Some TVs are "smart TVs" and already come with this high-tech function, but not ours.  However.....we learned immediately after we bought it, that it's not exactly internet browsing--it's more like downloading apps, and it's fairly limited.  And yet again, guess which network doesn't have access? So we returned it two hours after we bought it.
• We also discovered that--lo and behold--it seems we are actually behind the times with getting rid of cable.  Turns out tons of my Facebook friends have eliminated cable years ago!  Many of them use one or more of the methods above, and it's way cheaper.  Where have we been?!?

So, our emotions went from "oh good we're not going to spend any money at all!" to "oh no, we're going to have to spend a lot of money!" to "oh we'll only have to spend a small amount" to "oh we're going to have to spend a fair amount" to....."why are we doing this again??"  In the end, we ended up buying a laptop which will (we hope!) connect to our TV and we will watch shows via the internet.  Yes--it's spending money in order to save money.  BUT, with the selling of our Civil War football tickets, we were able to buy the laptop without any debt involved!  Woo hoo!  And we will save money on the no-cable thing in about six months.....and if we decide not to return to cable after the one year, it will keep saving us more and more!

The bad news?  We got the very last laptop in stock for the sale we found, so it will take a week to ship from the warehouse.  So for this week, we're doing the ole rabbit ears and just have a few basic stations--plus a one week trial of Hulu Plus.  So as I type this.....Bryan is out in the garage by himself, reclined in his lawn chair, wearing a coat, drinking a cold one, and listening to the Beaver game on the radio.  Such a devoted fan!