Saving money and canceling cable

One of my goals this year is to save more money.  (And I hear every triathlete out there laughing.)  So last week, I made a big decision.

I cancelled my cable tv subscription.

Okay, so it’s not that big of a decision, but it sure felt big to me.  I’ve been thinking about canceling cable for a while now.  I realized that I really wasn’t using my cable subscription all that much.  I don’t watch a lot of TV.  Well, I take that back.  I watch a lot of TV, but it’s either on my computer while I’m getting ready for work or cooking dinner or it’s while I’m on the treadmill or trainer.  And when I’m actually watching something on the television itself, I’m using the DVR to catch up on a show that I recorded earlier.

Other than football season and New Year’s Eve, I’m not sure when I last watched live TV at home.

Since my blu-ray player gives me the ability to watch Netflix and Hulu Plus on my television, those replace a lot of what I was using the cable subscription for.  I can’t get every show that I love that way, but I can get a lot of them.  I lose a bunch of CBS shows, but I can watch them on my computer with no trouble through the CBS website.  And for other shows I lose (The Fosters, The Americans), I can try to buy them online if I want or just wait for the season to come out on DVD and rent it.  It’s not the end of the world.

My biggest worry about ditching cable was that I wouldn’t have local news if something big was going on and that I wouldn’t have Notre Dame football.  I knew about indoor antennas in theory, but figured they weren’t that great.  I had this vision of the awful antenna we had in college that had giant rabbit ears that had to be adjusted just so to get a halfway decent picture.

Oh, how wrong I was.  I did a little research, and not surprisingly, I live in an area with great over-the-air digital signal.  I chose an indoor antenna from Amazon.com that was reasonably priced and had good reviews, figuring that I could always utilize their return policy.  And it works great!  I get a bunch of channels.  I haven’t figured out what they all are yet, and yes, some are in Spanish and at least two appear to be shopping channels, but I do get the major networks.  Most importantly, I get NBC so I can get ND home games.  This is important to my life.

I’ll probably splurge on an Amazon Fire TV or something along those lines at some point.  The blu-ray player works for streaming shows, but it’s not ideal and doesn’t always respond the way it should.  And a Fire TV would be nice if I want to rent movies or buy episodes of shows to watch while I’m pounding out a ridiculous workout on the treadmill or spinning on the trainer.

I’ll check back in a few months from now to let you know how I feel about this decision.  Now to see where else I can save some money so I can buy more fun things for my bike.

Photo by mhiguera.