My girlfriend and I are not the most frugal people on earth, but we try. This is a story about killing our internet, and finding that it was a good way to save money for us.
We moved recently. We went from Charter (60 bucks/month, 25 mbps...ouch) to Windstream (60 bucks/month, <5 mbps...more ouch) with that move. We are big TV watchers...netflix, hulu, etc, and we play quite a few games (I use Steam a lot), and the girlfriend enjoys quite a bit of instagram. So cutting internet seemed like a pretty iffy idea. Then again, paying for a service that might not stream worth crap also seemed iffy.
So we did some math.
Here's what we paid per month before on various internet related expenses.
-60 Charter
-16 Netlflix (stream+1 DVD)
-8 Hulu
-30 verizon, 4 GB
Which brought us to about $114/month. That sucks. That's so much money for watching TV/internet. So we changed it up a bit. New stats...
-24 Netflix, 3 DVDs at a time
-50 Verizon, 8GB
So, that cut us to 74/month. The girlfriend can still instagram, I can still reddit and whatnot, and when Steam wants to reconnect once in awhile, or if we just want to use internet on an actual computer, we just set up a wifi hotspot with our extra phone data. Also, Netflix has a LOT of stuff in the DVD vault, including many TV shows.
I wouldn't call it frugal, but we are saving 40 bucks a month. We've been putting that money towards buying used DVDs, books, board games, and 2 player video games that we can play together.
We do miss a few shows....we had access to HBOgo via the girlfriend's parents. No more Game of Thrones. Also no more Brooklyn 99, which sucks, plus a few other shows. Steam sales are also much less eventful for me now, but that's okay. No sports channels really sucks, but I'm dealing with it....for now. Football season is coming up...
Anyways, thought I'd pitch the idea to anyone thinking about cutting their internet.
EDIT: I am terrible at formatting.
July 29, 2017 at 01:15PM
