Cutting the Cord

Like a lot of people, we cut the cable cord.  It's been long enough now that I feel pretty confident giving you all my review of the different services we use. 

First of all, we eased into streaming.  My husband wasn't really convinced, but our cable/Internet bill had become ridiculous.  It had finally crept up above $200/month and I was beyond done.  I bought a Fire Stick on sale and added it to the main TV.  We used it, along with the regular cable, for a couple of weeks.  Then the storm hit and since we were moving out of the house anyway, it seemed like as good of time as any to cancel U-Verse.  While we were living with mom and dad the rooms we stayed in didn't have a cable drop, so we had to either stream our TV or go downstairs and be sociable. 

We currently use Prime, Netflix, and Boomerang the most.  We also use PlutoTV and FreeDive occasionally.  And of course, YouTube.  So, let's talk about them, huh?

• Amazon Prime:  There's a pretty good chance that we'd have this even if we didn't stream TV, but I'm pretty sure that if Amazon ever split the video portion off into it's own separate entity a la Amazon Music Unlimited then we wouldn't bother subscribing to it.  The selection of movies and shows is just okay and the menu teases you with selections that are available "to rent" and not included as part of Prime.  I did enjoy the Mind Over Money series
• Netflix:  What can I say?  It's the original streamer.  The selection is good.  The menu is straightforward.  What you see is what you get as far as being included with the subscription price.  The bad news is that the price keeps going up.  Right now, it's still worth it, but the playing field is changing and I'm not sure for the better.  They are throwing a lot of money into original content, a lot of which is really good.  I can't wait for the next season of Stranger Things.
• Boomerang:  This is for the kiddo.  It's probably the one we get the most value out of.  It runs in the ballpark of $40/year and worth every penny.  Lots of old school cartoons:  Scooby Doo, Jetsons, Flintstones, Tom and Jerry, etc.  My only complaint about it is that unlike Netflix, it doesn't have an attention check after every couple of episodes.  It will play all day or night if it gets left on.  That's no bueno when you're not on an unlimited data plan.
• PlutoTV and FreeDive:  I'm bundling these together because they are super similar.  The lineup of content is even very similar.  This is a good way to get some of those Discovery Channel shows that I used to be such a sucker for.  Pluto does have a live option, in addition to on-demand, where you can watch their channels like you would watch regular TV channels.  We've been doing mostly on-demand for years anyway, so this doesn't matter much to us.  There is a live news channel though if you want to keep up with the news that way.  Both PlutoTV and FreeDive are free services and thus have ads.  They are pretty short, but can't be fast-forwarded through.  FreeDive seems to do a better job of placing the ads in natural breaks.  Pluto will sometimes stick an ad right in the middle of a sentence.  The content isn't super new or super vast, but it's definitely worth more than what you pay for it.
• YouTube:  Here I'm talking about just YouTube, not YouTubeTV.  I like the ease of casting a video from my phone to the TV using the app.  It's interface on the TV is kind of clunky, but it's another free option.  I like watching older shows, even if the quality is lacking.  I torture the kiddo by making him watch old episodes of Sea Hunt.  Good times.  

I'm very interested in the service Disney is planning to introduce soon.  At $6-7 a month, it is a little more expensive than Boomerang, which it would likely replace.  I have my doubts that Disney will be able to hold it at that price for very long either.  Time will tell whether or not this is something that will become part of our lineup.  There is a very real danger of adding more and more subscriptions without analyzing which ones you are actually watching.  We've been saying for years that we would like to be able to only pay for the channels we want.  Now, we're getting closer to that reality, and are finding that at $3-7 per channel, it may not be any cheaper to do so.  

One percent at a time

So, one thing that I've been really working on lately is increasing my savings rate.  At the end of last year, I adjusted my W-4 withholding, cut cable, and increased my retirement contributions by 9%.  I was able to get an additional 1% in February when I received a COL adjustment to my paycheck.  I'm currently at about 30% between my work plan and my Roth IRA.  During next open season, I'm going to add a HDHP and HSA to the mix as well.  But is there anything else I can do?

The idea of optimization is that you can make little steps in your every day life to get closer to your goals.  So, my goal has become to decrease my expenses and/or increase my income 1% at a time.  I mean, why not?  It's "just" 1%.  A few dollars a day, really.  Enough to feed one of Sally Struthers' kids.  Or buy Alex Trebek's life insurance.  But that 1% can be huge.  I'm only about 4% away from maxing out my work plan.  If I can find money that can be better optimized as savings then I want to do it. 

Because 1% seems like such a small amount, I started looking at the things that can be cut easily.  The low-hanging fruit, if you will.  So, I started reading articles with titles like '15 Simple Tips for Saving Money."  And what I found was....that I'm already a cheap bastard.  Seriously, tips like "Don't buy $5 coffee" and "Make a budget and stick to it."  In all my searching, the only tip I found helpful was one about keeping your car tachometer below 2000 RPMs to improve gas mileage.  That shit works, yo. 

So, back to the drawing board.  I started looking at what my expenses were vs. what I had budgeted for them.  I found that on average I was budgeting about $5 too much a week for gas and $10 per month too much for electricity.  Now we're getting somewhere.  When I run the 2020 budget in a couple of weeks I'll be able to budget less for those two items. 

I've also cut the amount that I spend on groceries down about $10 every two weeks.  My grocery bill is already pretty bare bones, so after this, there's not a whole lot of room to cut it down anymore.  I've got a post planned for my shopping strategy, so I won't go too much into it here. 

Finally, I took a look at my utilities and realized that my Internet company had introduced new plans.  The plan I'd been on was for 600 GB per month at 150 mbps.  The new plan was 600 GB per month at 200 mbps....for $15 less each month.  I couldn't make that change online...I did have to actually call and talk to an actual human being...the horror!  No, actually she was very nice and didn't give me any grief about switching plans. 

All of those little tweaks gave me the 1% I needed to increase contributions again.  Just three more percent to go...