Life without cable

Let's face it. We all hate cable. We hate that every time we want to watch something somehow there is not a single thing to watch on over 200 channels. (I found this especially true during the long winter months on the weekend). As I was deciding on my fate of going from a career woman to a stay at home mother, my husband and I went over our finances. We looked at all of the money that was going out each month and if they were needs or wants. We found that we spent a good deal of our budget on things that we actually needed like rent, car insurance, heat, food and electric. Our next highest expense was cable. We were paying about $125 a month for service which did not include any premium channels or internet service. We also paid $50 for DSL internet service which moved at the rate of dial up (cue in the AOL logging in music here).

We found that this was an area that we really needed to review and look for a better alternative. We decided that we would have to really look at how much we actually "watched tv'. Over a two week period we were mindful of what our viewing habits were. At the end of the two weeks we were pretty surprised at what we learned. 

We learned that, for the most part, the television was on a lot, but for the most part it was just background noise. We also noticed that we tended to really just watched our local channels with the exception of ESPN. We knew that our marriage with cable was over as it was really only a one side love affair. 

Before we took the plunge of living with no cable we looked for what we could use as alternatives. We knew that we would be depending on the internet more for streaming so we found a great deal on high speed service with a two year contract ($30 which was ten times the speed we were used to and we saved $20 a month). We also looked into streaming services. When it came to streaming services we already had Amazon Prime which we used for the shipping, but we never used the streaming service. This was something we already had and what a shame that we were not using it. We also added Netflix. 

So, how do you watch all of these things on your television you may be asking yourself. Well friends there is this tiny inexpensive device called the Amazon Fire TV Stick. It is super easy to use. Simply plug it into your TV via a USB and your done. The best part is that you can also transport it to all the other TV's in your home. The voice activation feature is also pretty neat too. Now you can access all of your streaming options in one place. It's amazing how something so small can do so much. It can be used to play games, stream music and so much more!

If you are on the fence about your love/hate relationship with your cable bill, I say give this a try!

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