TV Detox, Our Month Without Cable

My family thought I was crazy. We are talkin' cray cray, when I told them I thought we should cancel our cable subscription, especially my husband who is a sports obsessed, Sports Center addicted, football/baseball/college basketball/hockey {or anything else that keeps score} fan.

 

My older children, Kaleb (11) and Lucy (9) believed I was imposing a cruel and unusual punishment. Frankly, I don't see the point in paying over $200 for cable and Internet service, and it had been driving me bananas for months that the TV is always on. Whoever was the first to wake in the house usually stumbles to the on switch before doing anything else, as if it needed to be on for the house to function. To me, there's something wrong with that. Something fundamentally and philosophically wrong with my family's addiction to TV; the boob tube; the idiot box. It was time for a change, so at the beginning of the year, the cable box went back to the cable guy, and our "adventure" began.

Don't get me wrong... I LOVE TV. I have always liked watching shows & have my favorites {day time TV}, but on the other hand, I was assessing how much time was spent wasted watching shows. Do I really need to know about people obsessed with life size dolls {Anderson Cooper}? Do I really need to watch her say yes to the dress. Do I really care what place Honey Boo Boo got at her pageant? Does it matter in my life who got sent home from the Bachelor? Does if make a difference in my life what drama is doing down in Salem {Days of Our Lives}? Nope, nope and nope. If I spent as much time in my life studying instead of watching TV, I could probably have a couple Masters degrees by now. Doh. If I spent all the late night hours wasted on Jimmy Fallon or Kimmel, I would be a much better rested woman!

I knew that I didn't want to go cold turkey. Just because I wanted cable gone, in this information and entertainment age, I didn't want to be completely off the grid. so, we just made changes. When we cancelled our cable through Wave, we also cancelled Internet with them. We signed up for Centurylink Business Internet (my husband has a business process serving for the courts). We were able to save a chunk of change that way. Now our bill will look something like $30/month rather than close to $200. Then we added a Hulu Plus subscription, which is $8 per month. We already had Netflix for another $8 per month. And we also have an Amazon Prime account that allows us to access free movies and shows. We stream everything through our Roku box, PS3 or Wii, which enables Internet (and thus Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, MLB network, Pandora etc) to stream right to our tv. In other words, we aren't missing much and we changed our bill from $200 to $46 per month! That's a savings of $154 per month; $1,848 per year!!!! {that's a vacation!} Yay!

A downside: we don't get any local or network channels. I have learned how to stream news broadcasts through the laptop, and my husband found a couple of great sites for streaming live sports online. In our near future, we are going to invest in a converter & hdmi cable (about $60 from Radioshack) so we can hook the laptop to the TV and makes even more shows/movies/news available. I also considered investing in a digital antennae, but the good ones are spendy, and I've come to the realization that I {we} really don't even miss cable that much!

The Silver Lining[s]: Since the TV detox started a little over a month ago, we have spent more dinners around the table, more game nights as a family, more time cleaning, crafting, sewing, cooking, doing homework, reading, spending time outdoors and just plain being present. In all honesty, I can't think of one time anyone has complained about missing cable since it's been gone. Not only that, but we have already saved over $300! I am loving it and I'm pretty sure my family is too.