Friday, March 22, 2013

We pulled the plug!

Well we finally did it…we cancelled cable! Holy smokes this is a big deal. If you know us, we watch quite a bit of TV. Dan especially loves watching TV! We have several shows we love to watch together and we also watch a lot of sports. It’s kind of a joke that Dan doesn’t read books but he always says he learns just as much from watching TV. Sure.

We have talked about cancelling our cable for years now but we just didn’t do it. It has honestly been a 5 year battle of haggling with Comcast every time one of our promotions runs out and our bill skyrockets. At first I didn’t mind doing it and they were pretty easy to give us another promotion. But after a few years, I got so sick of our bill changing constantly and they seemed to crack down more and not offer as many promotions. We threatened to cancel several times and they would always give us a decent deal. But it is still pretty pricey and we had a lot of the extras like DVR, HD and a few extra channels for sports. It was a luxury for us and we used it a lot and really enjoyed it so we didn’t feel bad paying a lot for it.

Now that Owen is here and Summer is coming, we finally did it. We want to spend time with Owen instead of watching TV and we will spend more time outside as well. It feels nice to simplify in this very small way. We also decided that we want to buckle down and be hard core about saving money so that when we are ready and able, we can move closer to the Salt Lake area. We adore our house, neighborhood and ward, but we are just so dang far from family, friends and work. So we want to try to save enough to get into the type of house we want in the area we want. And most likely I will stop working at some point and we want to be able to comfortably live on one income. So cancelling cable is just one step towards those goals!

We did buy Apple TV (haven’t gotten yet) so we can still watch a lot of shows that are online and we might get Netflix or Hulu+ at some point as well. So we aren’t completely TV-free but we will definitely be watching a lot less of it. Yesterday Dan was at school and I just listened to Pandora on my phone while I folded laundry and played with Owen and it was very relaxing. It was only one night, but I really enjoyed it! Hopefully this will be a good change for us and I have a feeling that pretty soon, we won’t feel like we're missing much!