Am I Actually Saving Money By Not Having Cable?

Help, I love television and also saving money.

The best part about going home, aside from eating food that I didn’t buy and not having to leave the couch, is watching hours and hours of cable television without judgement or reproach. Never mind that most of the shows I watch are available streaming in some form or another: there’s something about scrolling through the endless list of options that soothes the mind. Most of the time, I end up falling asleep with the On Demand guide as background, seemingly unable to pick between House Hunters: International or Tiny House Hunters.

Watching television at home is a treat; the TV is enormous, the couch more comfortable than my own. Cable is part of that treat. And as a person in tenuous control of my own finances, I should be able to treat myself to cable if I want to. I think about it every month as I gently nudge my roommates for bill money, but I resist every time because it feels dangerous. While I know it would never happen, I envision precious hours of productivity and leisure time lost forever to a Keeping Up With the Kardashians marathon or watching Ina mince herbs for Jefferey.

Cable is too much money, I tell myself. Besides, I love it too much.

Cable is very expensive. A quick check of the Time Warner website confirms this fact. If I were to add the fancy cable — the one with HBO and maybe a DVR — to my existing package, we’d pay $71 on top of the $68 we pay for internet, making my share of the average bill $34.75. When sliced into a manageable chunk, that number seems okay. It’s a trip to the grocery store, some socks and some new underpants, a lipstick I don’t need but want very badly and a fancy juice. Armed with this number, let’s take a look at what I actually spend on the streaming services I use to watch all of my stories.

Netflix is $9.99 a month. Hulu is $7.99. Sling, a service that Nicole used to watch the Olympics, fills me with joy and costs $19.99.

I Tried Using Sling to Watch the Olympics

Occasionally, I will purcahse a full season of a television show that I can’t watch via these methods on Amazon — on average, $16.99 a month. My roommates don’t pay me for these services; the understanding is that if I ever break free from the chains of communal living, I will take these with me. The total? $54.96, almost $20 more than I would pay if I just bit the bullet, got the cable and lived my life to its fullest. All this money spent and I don’t even get E!. Once again, it seems I have played myself.

Maybe next year, I will bite the bullet and get the cable. Maybe I will cut back on things I don’t need in order to make room for that which I want.

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