Thursday, October 8, 2009

Simple Savings

Looking for ways to save a few extra bucks? Let's look at your household expenses. Do you have cable tv? The question you could ask yourself is, why? With a few resources you could entirely replace cable tv, and save money in the process.

Netflix lets you rent DVD's for a monthly fee. The plan I currently subscribe to is 1 DVD at a time for $8.99/month. We usually cycle through quite a few DVD's during a 30 day period, and we supplement our Netflix DVD's with Redbox ($1.09 per DVD/Day) when we don't get our next DVD soon enough. Between the two, we spend less than $15/month.

Hulu.com/NBC.com/Fox.com/ABC.com/Comedycentral.com/ etc.... Free television shows you can watch whenever you want. No DVR required, which means no evil extra monthly fee. The only thing you have to deal with is random commercials, which is actually...just like real TV. So no loss there. Did I mention it's free?

Remember that Netflix thing I mentioned?

If you have an XBOX360 or other Netflix enabled media player and a Netflix subscription, you have access to over 17,000 titles that can be instantly streamed to your TV. All that crazy TV action is included in your Netflix subscription, and you can watch as much streaming stuff per month as you want with that $8.99/month plan that I mentioned before.

Buy video games? I've got an answer for that too. Gamefly.com offers a 1 game out at a time plan for 15.95/month. Yes, that's some cash, but considering that games cost $60/month, it's a deal if you like buying games. I've personally saved cash on games that I would have bought otherwise. I've realized there are not really that many games that I actually want to own, but there are quite a few I'm willing to rent.

Use your cell phone? Let's take a look at that one. Is there a cheaper plan you could use? Maybe you don't actually need 3,000,000,000 minutes per month plan. Do you even use unlimited internet on your phone? If you do, would it be that much of a change to downgrade? Maybe there is an employee discount/corporate discount/loyalty discount that you could get applied to your account. I did some research and got a 22% discount on my wireless bill through my occupation. Google it, and see what pops up!

Do you have a home phone? Why? If you cancelled that and your cable, and just kept your internet, would you really notice after a few weeks? Give it a shot, and add up the money you will save. The wife and I just have our cell phones, and it works pretty well for us.

While we are on the subject of internet service, do you need the whizbang fastest? We downgraded to the lower speed and have not really noticed, even with some online gaming. Try it, and see if you can save some money there too.

Remember that $75/month I threw out as a savings amount last post? If you add up some of the things just mentioned, you are there!

Or... you could build your own HDTV antenna. I couldn't resist.

4 comments:

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  2. Great post! It's so simple, but when you add stuff up like this it's obvious how much money can be wasted . . .

    (like random $38 purchases at Forever 21, doing that once a month adds up to over $450 a year . . . how much would that $456 turn into if it was put into at 401K instead?)

    makes you wonder ;-)

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  3. You can use the netflix streaming (watch instantly) on any computer (you have to install Silverlight). I spend most of my time streaming those and ignore the dvds I get in the mail.
    Don't want to deal with commercials? Try http://eztv.it If you get tricky you can set up RSS to automatically download the shows you specify when they're released. No commercials and no loading times.

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