Thrifty Thursday: Cheap entertainment...

If you had told me 5 years ago to give up my cable TV programming, my beloved magazines with their bright, shiny, happy pages, and weekly DVD rentals, I would have cried a little (because I would have felt a bit remorseful about beating you senseless).

Fast forward a few years... The plan is in place for me to quit my job and be a stay-at-home Mom.  This leads to some radical new behavior taking place to cut some costs and start saving money like the dickens.

Fast forward 2 more years... Out radical behavior paid off huge.  We haven't had cable TV since then, my final magazines are still trickling in, but none have been renewed, and I can't remember the last time I hit up Blockbuster for some evening entertainment.  Are they even still in business?  That's about $80.00 per month saved on the cable bill (we still pay about $60.00 per month for the wicked-mega-fast cable Internet), about $20.00 per month on magazines (this includes subscriptions and impulse buys at the check-out counter.  I had a problem.), and about $25.00 a month for weekly DVD rentals at the video store (not including the gas to drive there).

Here's how I cope with the loss...oh, wait, I didn't loose anything...I just get it for free now.  OK, so here's how I get my cheap entertainment:

The Talk.  This show is my guilty pleasure. 

~Cable TV... The entity called the World Wide Web that you happen to be using to read this very blog post, is also a goldmine of free television programming.  Almost every major network has yesterday's episodes available on their websites for free.  In the 2 years since cutting out "normal" TV, we've only found one drawback...The Survivor winner is always leaked to us before we have a chance to watch the final episode.

One of my favorites.  So glad their website rocks.   RealSimple.com 

~Magazines... The same electronic box we use to view our favorite shows on for free is also home to an over-abundance of magazine content.  Every single magazine I used to buy or subscribe to has a ridiculous amount of their content on their websites.  The entire publication isn't duplicated for free on their site, because that would just be commercial suicide for the company, but a great deal of it is available.  And once my final subscriptions have finally run out, and I don't have the magazine in my hand to compare to, how on Earth am I ever going to know what they left out online that I could be getting from the glossy pages?

~DVD rentals... OK, this one's not entirely free, but it might as well be.  Once in a while, when we're grocery shopping, we'll stop at the RedBox kiosk on the way out of the store.  It costs $1.00 for a 24-hour DVD rental.  One.  One single dollar.  And as an added bonus, we're not wasting the fuel just for a trip to get the DVD.  We're getting our movies when we were already at our grocery-getting destination.  Sometimes it's even worth the fuel savings to wait an extra day to return it when I'm planning on driving by there again.  I'm kind of a geek, so I actually did the math on that.  My car gets 34 mpg.  A gallon of fuel here currently costs about $3.89, which means that it costs me about $0.11 per mile that I drive.  My grocery store is about 7 miles from my house.  So it's a 14 mile round trip that costs me $1.54 in fuel.  Since the RedBox charges an extra $1.00 every 24 hours, it's $0.54 cheaper for me to pay the extra-day fee than it is to make a special trip to return it.

So, let's recap... I'm a dork, but it saves us mad money.  What we used to spend on TV, Internet, magazines, and DVD rentals:  $185.00 per month.  What we spend now:  $64.00 per month.  As my dad would say, "Same thing, only different."


Thanks for stopping by,
-Lindsey