I saw a post on the front page about a guy who got rid of his cable boxes to save on rental fees. It got me thinking about how many people didn't know that not renting your boxes from their cable provider was an option. Now, I know a lot of people on this sub have cut the cord altogether, but many haven't and have cable or at least internet. For those of us who haven't or can't, you can save hundreds a year for a relatively minor initial investment in buying your own equipment.
Last year I was looking at my ridiculous cable bill, and I realized that I was paying $65 a month just in "Equipment Rental Fees." $45 a month for my DVR cable box and $20 for my modem/router. After a bit of searching, I found out that you can buy your own cable box. You can get basic ones for roughly $60, but I wanted to keep my DVR features, so I found one from Vivo (remember them?) for $200. This thing has 4k streaming for Netflix etc., more DVR storage than my old box, multi-channel recording, and a better UI than my old box. It even has built-in Amazon Alexa. I found a decent modem and router on sale at Best Buy for $60 and $70 respectively. You could probably get these, specifically the router for cheaper. I do most of my work online, so it was worth the investment for me to get a quality one. It works way better than the provided equipment. My speed didn't increase all that much, but my range was almost doubled.
All said and done; I spent $330 on buying my own equipment. Not only does it work much much better than the provided equipment, but I'm saving $60 a month on my bill (I still have to pay $5 a month to rent the cable card). I've saved over $600 so far, so that $300 investment doesn't seem so bad.
September 10, 2018 at 11:32AM
