Bye-bye television.

Well, more like, bye-bye Dish Network.  Management and I sat down and talked about everything from the economy playing out like the Titantic to how much TV we actually watch and came to the conclusion that we are not getting $120 a month worth of anything from it.  Our solution? We are ditching it.  Completely.  Moving on to cable? Nope.

Here’s our crazy idea. GreenCine for our main DVD rentals, Netflix account for streaming, and an Xbox 360 for watching the streams and playing games.  All together it is a little less than $30 a month so we are looking at a net savings of $90 a month and if we cancel the gym and spa memberships we will be saving around $260 per month.  Sure we have the up front cost of the Xbox but that really is only 20% of the annual cost of Dish.
We are thinking that the end of this month is when we’ll leap feet first into the “post television” era, just in time for the Holidays.

The thought is that we should be making cutbacks to our lifestyle before we are forced to and to truly make an effort to live as far below our means as we can.  We have, over the past year, been consciously cutting back on dining out and delaying or not making purchases that aren’t of an immediate need.  The hope is that we can put our lifestyle on a diet so that when lean times hit they won’t feel so lean.

If anything we’ll be saving some money and maybe have more time to read a book and who knows maybe it will all work out and television as a monolithic service will be nothing but an expensive memory.