Finally enough talking about it, we finally did it — we cancelled our cable TV. As I wrote about before, it was strangely painful for me. My wife? No so much. She was ready for it to be gone. Really we didn’t watch much on the HD-Expanded-Basic-Digital-blah-blah-blah that we were paying an absurd amount for each month. We were afraid we’d miss Psych on USA and the NHL games on Versus. Well, we can catch Psych on Hulu and, well, I just miss hockey.When we have told our friends we were going to do this, it seemed like the guys were generally shocked and wondering what we would do for TV — the women were happy for us. It really was a strange dichotomy of results.
We have our home computer hooked into the TV now — in fact, that’s where I’m writing this post (and it’s a little hard on the eyes). Eventually I will want to get a “nettop” to replace the ginormous desktop computer sitting next to the TV, but it will take a while for the finances to allow it.
So why did we really cut out the cable?
(More after the jump)
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Filed under Debt
Tagged as Dave Ramsey, Debt
Back in 2004, we started Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace Class. After a bit more than 2 years of skrimping and saving and cutting back, we paid off all of our debt. We were debt freeeeeee. We even called Dave’s radio show and screamed. We kept working on his baby steps and didn’t even get all the way through the next one before we “fell off the wagon.” The plan was supposed to work like this: we take all the money we had been putting towards our debts and save up 3 to 6 months of expenses.
It worked for a little while. We got our savings up over 5 digits! But, it got too easy to start sniping off some money from the monthly savings. Grab some of it here, throw some there. Then we started using our credit card a bit again. We had this money available in the budget for this and just paid off the credit card each month. The expenses were not planned each month. They weren’t necessarily impulse buys, but just not planned.
More after the Jump
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OK – so we are in the first month of working on our new debt and re-looking at our overall financial situation. Well, we started out with a bang. We knew we were getting into the ring with a formidable opponent that we had created. Our poor spending decisions, laziness, and vacations fed this beast. And he was looking to take out his pound of flesh with around an 8% interest rate. And really, in the world of credit cards, that definitely isn’t a usurious rate, but it’s still sucking money away from us.
So, while we’re putting our first opponent through boot camp, we were getting fat and living the high life.
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Finally enough talking about it, we finally did it — we cancelled our cable TV. As I wrote about before, it was strangely painful for me. My wife? No so much. She was ready for it to be gone. Really we didn’t watch much on the HD-Expanded-Basic-Digital-blah-blah-blah that we were paying an absurd amount for each month. We were afraid we’d miss Psych on USA and the NHL games on Versus. Well, we can catch Psych on Hulu and, well, I just miss hockey.When we have told our friends we were going to do this, it seemed like the guys were generally shocked and wondering what we would do for TV — the women were happy for us. It really was a strange dichotomy of results.
