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Do you pay for cable

If so how much does your cable specifically (not phone/tv/Internet) cost? Im trying to decide if it is worth GN and I sucking up the cost, my guess is no as our TV is more of a decoration than a device we use to entertain ourselves.

p.s. we are in Barcelona right now, how cool is that!

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46 COMMENTS

  1. HD Cable (more than basic cable but no movie channel extras) with one DVR and another nonDVR receiver plus internet is $122/month.

  2. Nope – we get Netflix for $7.99 a month and piggy back off of my parents HBO GO since they have no need for it. We access both via our XBOX so we pay the XBOX live membership which is $47.00 a year because we order the subscription card via Amazon where it is cheaper. So all told we pay $11.91 a month. We used to have all the channels and the biggest cable package they offered – honestly, we don’t miss it. Our local library also gets new movies immediately and they are free to check out.

  3. Rabbit ears as well. (We’re in the prairies in Canada where we get 4 stations — 3 english, 1 french.) We hook up the laptop to the tv to watch streaming online videos….so the internet classifies as cable for us.

  4. We cut the cable cord about a year ago. It was very hard considering we have two school aged children who love their tv. We survived and just watch all our shows online. We have a Netflix subscription that runs about 9 dollars a months and pay 25 dollars a month for internet. Huge difference from the $160 we used to pay for cable and internet!

  5. We don’t have cable. With a mixture of iTunes, Internet, Hulu and Netflix we don’t really need it.

  6. Before I bought and moved into my condo, I paid for limited cable. Sometimes it’s called basic cable. It was about $15/month as of June 2012. That gave me all the major networks in HD even. It wasn’t a bad compromise. Definitely a nice-to-have. You don’t have to spend tons of money to have cable.

  7. Cable, internet and home phone for $124 per month and that includes 13% tax.

    Most personal finance writers say I should end it but I like tv. I am not interested in a lot of movies and I don’t follow a lot of tv shows. I like news. I am flipping between 2 Canadian news programs while I catch up on my morning blog reading.

  8. I get cable during college football season then turn it in the rest of the year. I’m just getting ready to go order it again, so I can’t remember the price. Otherwise I use netflix/hulu through my Roku player.

    Cable feels like such a rip-off. I’m glad alternatives exist now.

  9. We’re about to lay down $65 a month for the most basic cable that includes ESPN in the lineup. My husband INSISTS. If it were me, we wouldn’t have cable.

  10. No cable! We cut off cable and it was awesome. We only have Netflix and Hulu ($19 for both). Everything else you can find online eventually.

  11. I pay $7.99 for streaming Netflix, which I use with my Wii (Wii has no service fees).

    I recently paid $70 for a used Mohu antenna and digital cable converter, essentially just to watch football now and then. I admit I was tempted to buy a $1500 HD flat panel so that I wouldn’t have to “waste” $50 on a digital converter for my 15 year old CRT low-def TV, even though it still has a flat screen and a lovely picture.

    I’ve also been considering getting, or switching to, Amazon Prime, since it’s month-for-month a bit cheaper than Netflix (and I can get a student discount!) AND I would take advantage of the free 2 day shipping 10-ish times a year. But honestly, my Netflix queue grows faster than I can watch it, so it’s not like I ever don’t have something worth watching.

  12. I’m about to cut the cord tomorrow actually. I think I pay about $100 for basic cable with on demand.

  13. Cut the cord in January, never looked back. Full disclosure though, I piggyback off my friends/family Netflix, Hulu, ESPN, and HBO….that being said, my internet only bill is $62/month.

  14. I do pay for cable! HD (no extra charge for that, it comes with), all channels except for the premium channels (HBO, Starz, Showtime). I also bundle it with internet- I got the lowest possible internet speed 3MBps, but then was upgraded for free to 10MBps. Altogether this costs me about $89/month.

    Truthfully, I pay for the ability to watch shows when I want to. I watch maybe 5-10 hours of TV a week, so it could be a waste. But I do like coming home, unwinding and watching whatever I want…or whatever is on TV. How else can I do a marathon of HGTVs Love it or List It? Lol.

    • Love it or list it too! Completely understand. I have no tv, no cable and no internet. Paying off student loans!

  15. No cable, and recently got rid of our TV. We mostly just have internet now and it’s somewhere less than $45/month. We watch almost all of our TV for free by waiting for our favorite shows to air their episodes online.

  16. We pay $222 for Bell home phone with unlimited long distance, internet and cable with dvr plus $7.99 for Netflix. Out of the three cable packages we have the middle one and that’s basically for HGTV and Family Channel. We watch about 7 channels total including sports – too bad we can’t pay by the channel! I can see a time where we’ll drop our home phone in the future and with so many new choices coming out with new companies (I don’t think Hulu is in Canada), change is on the horizon.

    • Most of the popular shows are available online at the CBC, CTV and Global sites. Hulu is blocked here.

  17. I pay $50 per month for cable and internet, I don’t know how much each portioin is. I only have channels 1-20 so I think the cable portion is pretty low. I also have netflix for $7.99 a month.
    I used to pay $118/month for more channels but decided it wasn’t worth it so I added the netflix and reduced the cable. I don’t miss it much.

  18. Unfortunately, I do pay for cable. We do not go out to movies or any other social activities so cable is our “luxury”. II pay about $60/month.

  19. Bunny ears for us, have never had cable. Can hook antenna up to the Mac and watch reg TV on computer and record fav shows and pbs for kiddletts. We mostly watch PBS except for my Person of Intrest obcession.

  20. My only options for cable or internet are Comcast or RCN. And since Comcast is the devil, I have RCN. I got the cheapest possible option, which was internet + basic cable for $43/month. I think that’s a pretty good deal. Without cable, internet-only isn’t much cheaper than what I’m paying for both services.

    PS – Anyone try Chromecast?

  21. I pay for internet, $74 with Comcast. From that, I use Netflix off our PS3s plus websites that let you watch TV without commercials. Our computer is connected to the flat screen.

    We also have Magic Jack, which I really like.

  22. Nope. I have a TV which I dust more often than I turn on. I just lost interest in the type of shows out there. It’s not that they are bad (many are well written and acted) they just don’t hold my interest like other forms of entertainment. I watch the occasional show online but usually half way thru I lose interest and start to do something else.

  23. We have Roku with Netflix and Hulu Plus subscription. SO thats about $15.00/month. Plus we sometimes get something out of the RedBox. Does paying for internet count in this?

  24. No. We’re also Netflix streamers, through our Wii. We have an antenna which picks up HD over the air channels, so we can get the local things if we want. But usually, we don’t.

  25. Cable is very expensive on Long Island even if you just get a fairly basic service, Every once in a while I try to scale back my service to something more basic, but sooner or later they jack up the rates anyway. I am paying about $100 a month for TV and Internet. They do give a 1-year bundled rate for cable, Internet, and phone, but I don’t want to give them a monopoly on my account especially if there are power outages like we had with Sandy.

    With my cable feeding into my computer, however, I can record things like PBS specials – opera, ballet, theatre – that I can then use to burn my own DVDs for nothing. This offsets my costs a little bit.

  26. I have basic- channels 1-20 a la Comcast- and pay $23 per month. But I also use Hulu Plus which is $7 per month.

  27. My take:

    TV is not a necessity – if you want to watch movies every now and then just get yourself a Netflix account. I’ve never had cable TV – to me it’s just a very common way to waste loads of money.

    Cheers,
    Chris

  28. No Cable, but $105 for crappy WAN internet (Explorenet in Canada) with about 1 Mbit and way less at prime time. Downside of living in the country. Cut Cable (Satellite) 3 years ago and don’t regret it. May add netflix down the road…

  29. Not to be the moral police, but for those of you who claim you’re “piggybacking” – that’s stealing. First, someone else is paying for it, and you’re not chipping it for something you’re using. And in the broader scheme, everyone who does pay subsidizes those people who steal.

  30. Out of our $155 cable provider (bundle package with internet) monthly bill, $94 goes towards cable (which includes 1 HD/DVR box for the big screen in the basement, and 1 HD box for the 40-something inch TV in living room). We’ve been looking into ways of saving a few bucks/month to build up our emergency fund… losing the cable is top of the list. I’m guilty of watching more TV than Hubby does, so it’ll be more painful for me, I think… but, I’d get use to it I’m sure.

    More money will be saved when we downgrade from our smartphones to dumbphones when our plan’s done in February, 2014. We don’t use our phones to their full potential, so we don’t need all the bells and whistles.

  31. My wife and I watch a lot of movies/TV — we rarely go to the theater, so we usually just add it to our Netflix queue and get the discs when they come out.

    **Internet — $64.95/mo (Comcast 30Mbps)
    **Netflix — ~$13/mo for 2 discs at a time because I don’t care for the quality of the streaming selection, though we currently do have streaming free for 1 year due to a promotion with a new TV (old one died)
    **DirecTV — ~$60/mo for Genie DVR + 1 extender + HBO. Going to go up substantially in Dec and again in Feb when some promotional credits stop and/or are reduced. Locked into contract through Feb 2015. Probably also going to add the low-tier sports package ($7/mo) for watching the local NBA team this year.
    **Amazon Prime — Cancelled a couple months ago due to reduction in the amount of stuff we buy from Amazon, and we never really used the streaming anyway because the selection is worse than Netflix streaming.

    We gave cable-free a try for about 6 months using a Mohu leaf antenna for OTA, but soon realized that probably 80% of what we watch are on cable networks (HBO, AMC, FX, USA, and TNT). Worth it to us.

  32. We cancelled our cable in January 2013 and haven’t looked back.

    Internet: $29.95/month for 1 year, then we will research again for the best bargain if they won’t negotiate with us.
    Netflix: $8.07/month for streaming only, no DVDs mailed to us.
    Amazon Prime: $39/year, I work at a college and get a “student discount” if you have an .edu account. We wouldn’t have this if we had to pay $80/year.
    PlayOn: $24.99/year. It means that my pc has to be on to run a little server that basically allows us to stream to any device in our house.

    We still plan on buying a OTA antenna but haven’t found one we liked yet.

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