I should warn you about the title of this post right up front.
We like TV in our house, but only in small doses. Cord-cutting is only getting more common—people are leaving cable, but often they move to dish, Sling, or streaming instead. Want to watch TV without cable or satellite and still get good HD without spending a fortune? Read on.
At our place we used to rely on Apple TV (since writing this we switched to the Amazon Fire Stick). That little box is the only thing under our flat screen. Minimal and simple.
In an evening, my wife and I will watch some Netflix and a few clips from late-night shows on YouTube. That’s plenty for about $14 a month.
We also use a high-def antenna for network TV. It pulls in free over-the-air channels with a great picture. Mostly we use it for Big Ten football in the fall—ever since The Biggest Loser got canceled over a year ago, we haven’t needed much else.
Thinking back, TV used to be pretty limited. Despite the bulky sets, the picture and sound were rough—those old CRTs from the 70s and 80s.
Remember Grandma and Grandpa’s enormous TV consoles? A tiny 19-inch screen wrapped in a huge oak cabinet that held records and other stuff. As a kid I loved Saturday morning cartoons, and after school there was always an hour of Hanna-Barbera or the Flintstones. Lots of repeats, but it felt normal.
Seven hours of TV a week might sound like a lot for a kid today, but I wasn’t glued to the set. We were outside playing, biking, building snow forts—free-range kids. With only a handful of channels (NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS), your choices were limited and everything ran on a schedule: soaps, cartoons, news, sitcoms, dramas, Johnny Carson, the national anthem, then static.
Life was simpler and you had a good reason to pull out the Monopoly board when TV got boring. Today it’s all on-demand, big-screen, and HD—we’ve gladly been seduced by the Dark Side.
With better tech and so much on-demand TV, it’s worth remembering the value of hitting the OFF button. There’s more to life than reruns.
That said, don’t take away my The Bachelor or Dancing With the Stars. Good luck prying the remote from my hand.
Here’s my mostly unscientific list of why cutting back is worth it. If you think of other benefits, drop them in the comments.
Since we play at being a personal finance blog, let’s look at the money side. The average household still spends about $100 a month on TV. Who needs 238 channels? That’s around $1,200 a year—or about $57,000 over 20 years in opportunity cost.
Money aside, TV tends to pull our attention away from the people right next to us. The one exception is the Super Bowl—no one watches until a great ad or halftime happens. Sometimes it’s better to put the remote down and play a raucous game of UNO with the family.
Health-wise, sitting too long gives me back pain. After an hour of Better Call Saul my eyes get sore and watery—not from sadness over Hector Salamanca, but from eye strain and too much blue light. Maybe I need a lawyer—just kidding.
I can’t quit Netflix either. The flood of original shows from streaming services has been amazing lately. That’s probably a reaction to network TV’s steady diet of reality shows—Big Brother doesn’t exactly sharpen the mind.
The temptation to stay plugged in is real. The trick is moderation: cut back where you can and try to phase the screen out now and then. I’m not saying you should ditch TV completely—if you live somewhere with long winters, like Minnesota, indoor entertainment helps. Plus, State is playing Michigan soon!
We recently signed up for Disney+ and we’re excited to see how much we get for about $70 a year. Seems like a bargain.
In the spirit of SemiFIRE, try cutting your viewing time in half and maybe shrink the screen a bit to encourage more real interaction. Swap reality shows for a good dramedy or a Nova episode. And if you still have cable, consider cord-cutting—you don’t want what happened to Steven M. Kovacs to happen to you.
42