Pulling the Plug on Cable

We finally did it.  We have talked about it for quite some time but for some reason we always had some reason why it justified the monthly expense.  With the lives we are leading now it simply is not worth the money for us to pay for cable TV.  We have been paying $36 each and every month to watch maybe two TV shows and a few hockey games.  We have made the call and for the first time since our backpacking honeymoon of 14 months (always have to sneak that into the conversation) we are now unable to turn on a TV whenever we want.  We have decided that we could spend the $432 a year on better things then paying for entertainment we no longer use.  Now we will be able to spend are down time staring lovingly into each other’s eyes and talking about how to save the world….or work on the computer.

There are still times where it is nice to watch some TV and we have a much cheaper solution to that.  Quite often we will watch movies that we borrow from the Library as we can get new releases for 3 weeks at no cost including a good selection of kids movies.  Most of the time when we want to watch something however we do not have a couple of hours spend watching a movie so a 30 minute sit-com works much better. Again we can turn to the library as they have a pretty good collection of recent TV shows on DVD that we have not seen.  If we want to be even more recent many networks will stream last week’s episodes of current shows online.  This is a great way to watch current television whenever you want without having to pay for cable.  As an added bonus the commercial breaks are shorter for shows online.  Sports are also often streamed online as I have been able to watch most of the hockey playoffs from my laptop.  I was able to watch all of the Winter Olympics streamed online live and every game from the upcoming World Cup of Soccer will be streamed online in Canada.  Sure the quality is not as good as big screen high definition (OK not even close) but the quality matches perfectly to my level of interest for these events.

In our household we want to spend a lot of time as a family doing activities together, and our spare time is so limited, so we just cannot justify spending that much money on TV.  The alternative may not be as good but we do not think we will be missing much by pulling the plug on cable.  This is just one of these added expenses we are conditioned to feel we cannot live without but when you really look at it, it may be something you do not need at all.  Time will tell if we ever decide to spend the money on TV again but I have a feeling it may be a while.  We wondered how long we could last as a one car family and it has been 12 years now.  This could be a permanent change for us.