How To Lose Debt

So no one wants to give up their TV, right? No way, it has got to be the last thing to go….well maybe food?  No one is going to ask you to give it up, that is a personal decision.  I will however, review some of the options to see if there are any areas to reduce expenses.

For example, bundling some of these services with a single provider may reduce the expense.  I’d even go the other way and say breaking apart bundled services may save you money.  Such as you buy Internet from your cable company and buy cable TV from a Satellite provider like Direct TV or Dish Network.

Most of the cable and Satellite companies will provide you with “teaser” rates, like a reduced charge for services for the first 12 months, with a 12 month contract. In some cases, it may even be beneficial to swap back and forth, if the installation and/or setup fee is not too absorbent, and they have comparable services.

The first candidate for expense reduction is the one most cable companies are experiencing right now because of the economy. It’s the reduction or removal of premium channels. Do you really watch them that often to recoup the inflated value of their addition?

My local supermarket has a kiosk that rents DVD movies for $1.  OK, it’s a pain in the butt to return them, but it may be worth it if you only watch one or two movies a month. Just for one month you should write down every movie you watch on each premium channel, and see if it’s worth the cost.  My guess is its not, but my wife or your wife, may disagree!

There are other candidates to consider, depending on your particular service. There are a certain number of free channels that come with each package tier.  You might look at them and realize, you don’t watch any of them anyway, so you could go down one tier with little or no impact.  Do you really watch that golf channel….zzzzzz?

How about high definition?  Do you really need that?  I’ll admit that I have it, but I will also admit that with my eyesight, I probably can’t tell the difference anyway, in an independent taste test that is.

Are you paying for extra cable boxes each month to view premium channels in more than one room, when you could return the box and still watch regular cable channels without the box? How about a DVR?

Do you really record and watch lots of programming to recoup the monthly cost of the DVR? If you ask my wife, she’d rather give up the internet than to return our DVR.  Each person and family is different. So with decisions like these, come compromises. I’ll agree to keep my mouth shut during your movies, if you give the DVR up.  Like that will ever happen, on either case.

In case you haven’t noticed yet, in this expense reduction section of this blog, I’ve asked you to evaluate, and re-evaluate pretty much every area of your daily life.  My wife puts it this way. You need to ask yourself with each decision, each pair of pants you buy; do I really need it?  If the answer is no, then don’t because you will lose debt sooner.  If the answer is yes, ok, we will save in some other area.  It just can’t be yes to everything!