It’s Friday, so that means that it’s finally time to properly introduce and start posting about Living Frugal Friday. Over the next few weeks (and possibly months), I want to talk about the ways that our family is saving money just by making some simple changes.
When Ray and I bought our home a little over 8 years ago, we thought we were buying our “starter home”. Our plan was to live here for a few years and then move to our “forever home”. Little did we know back then that the housing market would crash and our plans would change.
After going over the pros and cons, we have embraced the idea of staying in our current home. One of the major pros of this decision is that we could have our home paid off within the next five our six years… and if we tighten our belts, even sooner than that!
Since getting out home paid off much sooner rather than later has become a goal of ours, we decided to go through our budget to see where we can try to squeeze out some extra savings. Cable TV was one area that we both agreed could be cut out completely.
A few years ago, we cut our cable down to the basic 5 channels. It was rough at first, but over time (with a little help from Netflix and Amazon Prime) we adjusted and no longer missed the channels and shows we had gotten so used to watching. We were getting HD quality programming on the channels that we did get, so all was good with our entertainment world.
Fast forward 4 years to this past fall, when we were no longer able to get our HD programming without having to pay for a converter box. We spoke with our cable provider and ended up subscribing to cable tv again. We were now able to watch shows we had never seen and all the sports we wanted… but after about three weeks something happened.
Ray and I noticed that the kids were wanting more… we noticed that although we were happy with our home, we had started wanting more too… that although we were getting 200+ channels, we really only watched two of them… and finally, we noticed that family time was now centered around which game or program was on… and we didn’t like it at all!
So we decided that once the Olympics are over, we will be canceling cable again… but this time we will be canceling everything, even the most basic channels. Doing this will not only be giving us extra money that we can put toward our mortgage, but it will also allow us to spend more quality time as a family again.
We’ll continue to subscribe to Netflix and Amazon Prime… both for the kids and for us. Honestly, that’s pretty much all we need, because that’s all we had been watching up until this fall anyway.
So there you have it, my first Living Frugal Friday tip… cut the cable. It will save you hundreds over the course of a year and it will give you back time that can be spent as a family.