Nate and Danielle discuss the recent changes that they have made to their cable and internet services along with tips for saving money on your cable bill.
Show Notes
Our cable/internet bill has been $87 for the past fourish years, but that ended this month. It jumped up over 25% to almost $110 per month. While we use the internet a lot and TV a good bit, it’s not a bill that we really wanted to see grow.
We explored the options and decided to cut the cord. Cutting the cord refers to unsubscribing to the traditional cable TV package and switching to over the air, streaming, or even no TV service at all.
Nate began researching before we made the switch. Out basic requirements were to make sure that we had internet service and could get a few TV channels and be able to record them.
We started by looking at OTA broadcast which include your major traditional networks and a few others. We purchased a $30 antenna on Amazon and if that worked, we would purchase a recording solution as well (approximately $250). So for an upfront cost of $280 we could have free TV with recording capabilities after that. We got the antenna, and had terrible reception so no dice there.
Nate also looked at streaming TV packages and the basic breakdown is that they all cost roughly $40 a month for the base set of channels and you can add on more from there. After looking through all of the options: DirectTV Now, Sling, Playstation Vue, YouTube TV, etc we went with DirectTV Now as it was the only one that had all of the channels that we wanted.
So we had a solution for TV, now on to internet.
Our current internet service was packaged with the TV and we have been happy with the service thus far. After Danielle called we found that we could cut cable, and double our internet speed from 50/50 up to 100/100 for $40 a month.
So far $80 a month we double our internet speed and have 65 steaming TV stations with DVR support. Score.
Things to look out for:
- Check your bills once a year and call and see if there is anything that you can do to save money
- See if you can purchase your equipment instead of renting it
- Our previous internet router costs $12 a month, over 4 years that’s $576 for something that we could have purchased for $75
- We purchased our new router at a cost of $150. The rental fee would have been $15 a month so we break even in 10 months and save money from there
- Shop services and see what you really need. For example we stop subscribing to HBO when Game of Thrones isn’t on and the same goes for Starz when Outlander isn’t on. These two shows are only on for 3 months of the year. By stopping the subscriptions except for when our shows are on we save ~$120 a year