Considering Dumping Cable?

We dumped cable at home and the office about 3 years ago. The kids were concerned, to put it lightly. To be clear, we don’t harbor any deep, philosophical hatred of cable. We just want to save money! Hidden fees and seemingly unprovoked increases had raised our bill by nearly $100 when we made the switch.

What do we miss?

Nothing!

What about live sports, HGTV, Nick Jr. and local networks?

We have them all!

Here is what we found.

It’s soooo much easier than you think!

1. Digital Television Antenas are cheap and good. – we bought a 50 mile DTV from Amazon for $25. We have no issues getting our local channels. Also, some streaming services are starting to offer local channels in their packages.

2. You already have internet. – We increased our internet speed for a slight bump in cost. At home and the office we can stream several services, play on our phone and work on our laptops without interruption.

3. We pay for 3 subscription services. On our terms! Hulu Plus, Netflix and SlingTV. We already had Amazon Prime, but now that they offer great TV shows, it’s even better. Sling also gets us live TV, including ESPN, HGTV, TBS, TNT, AMC. They have it all starting at $20 a month. By “on our terms” here’s what I mean…we pay for the sports package on SlingTV in the fall and winter. The only time we watch sports is during football and basketball season. It’s only $5 extra per month, but it’s $5 we can save by cancelling it when we aren’t using it.

We saved over $80 a month from dumping cable with an initial investment of less than $200 (less than our cable bill at the time.)

So, what do you need to dump cable?

1. A streaming device. We suggest Roku, but there are a ton of them out there.
2. Internet.
3. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and SlingTV are the majors. There are several free services that come with the Roku and several hundred more that you can add.

And by the way, the kids never missed a beat.