Cutting the Cord - How My Family Cancelled Cable

About six months ago, I decided it was time for my family to cut the cable TV cord. There were several factors that went into this decision.

One, my cable bill went up to over $200 a month. I called to ask wtf and was told that I was on some kind of graduated billing where my bill increased over three years to it's final $200+ that it was. This is for both cable and Internet. Considering how much TV we actual watch, this number was unacceptable.

Secondly, we'd had a little experiment with no cable for about three weeks when our house was struck by lightning and our cable wasn't working. This was my fault because I didn't feel like calling a tech out to the house. In that time, we streamed Netflix like it was cool. We had, at the time, 1 TB of data to use per month and almost hit that limit. And we didn't really miss the cable.

Thirdly, there are so many options out there that allow for you to customize what you want and what you watch. With Google Chromecast, Roku, Hulu, and Netflix (to name a few), there are so many subscriptions and packages to choose from that you can ensure that you're paying for what you want and not for what cable companies force on you.

So, we bought a Roku, cancelled the cable, and upped our Internet to 2 TB a month with a faster speed (not sure what that is). This is the biggest Internet package my cable company offers and it's $99.99 a month. Add in $11.99 for Netflix (that we were already paying so doesn't really count), $7.99 for Hulu, $22.46 for Sling, and $4.99 for FUBO and we're saving money. We're saving about $65.00 a month. What's more, is that the things we are choosing to pay for are things we actually watch. With cable, we were paying $200 for channels we were never watching.

I miss my subscriptions to STARZ, Showtime, and HBO but I can add those if I wish to. I don't at the moment.

Additionally, in anticipation of the 2016 Olympics, we bought a digital antenna and now we get all of our local broadcast channels like NBC, CBS, and ABC. We don't get FOX because we live too far and that's a bummer, but it's nice having those channels again and being able to watch the local news.

What I really like about our television watching subscriptions is that we can cancel them and resubscribe or add new stuff (Sling has add on packages plus HBO, etc.) any freaking time we want to. If you've been thinking about cutting the cord, DO IT!! I have absolutely no regrets.