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item month year 10 years % of salary
entertainment 200 2400 24000 6.451612903
Utilities 378 4543 45430 12.21258065
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Utilities
dish tv 58
verizon cell 82.98
internet/tele 69.61
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I am cancelling my dish tv in august. I am still on contract and they want something obscene like 400 bucks to cancel. And yes it is true I can find everything I watch on tv for free on the internet. I have already set up my old computer to connect to my tv. I wish i would of known about this sooner and believe that cable providers should be very scared of their future.
I would love some advice on cell phones. I have read some of the pay as you go forums and it seems complicated. Me and my wife used 200 minutes between the both of us last month for a whooping .36 cents a minute. I think this is robbery but with our long drive we have to have something for safety. I currently receive a 22% discount with verizon thru my work.
Internet/telephone- i am limited to a single dsl provider in the country and they require a telephone. The plus is that they do not cap the amount of downloading you do in a month so this will be good for watching tv on the internet. I have already called and downgraded the telephone last month to the minimum I can with absolutely no frills. This lowered the bill from 89 to 69. I didn't even know I had all that junk on the phone line. Learned this at ERE.
There will be better folks who can help with other stuff, and some of it is going to be forest for the trees common sense for you (like: stop eating out, don't go to the theaters, buy less stuff, groom your own pets, try and
hypermile, consider a moped, consider future cost of gas plus insurance and time and wear and tear vs. telecommuting income loss, set the thermostat far lower in the winter and much higher in the summer and open windows more often - and other appropriate things based on the reality of your situation and not inferred guessing based on budgets and brief comments), but let me tackle the highlighted stuff above. First thing I'm going to recommend is for you to read over the
communications superguide as it'll help you quite a bit with these areas and covers quite a bit more than just what you're dealing with and how to bring it all together.
Second, let's deal with Dish first. Good news is, you can cut your monthly costs with Dish substantially before you get out of contract. How? A secret, barely advertised television package called the "
Welcome Pack". So long as you've never had the package before and upgraded away from it, you're eligible to downgrade to it. $15/month for locals plus a few entertaining channels like Boomerang, RT, MTV2, MSNBC, Comedy Central, AMC, TBS, Hub and the
Hitler Ghost & Alien Hitler Channel. Tack on the free
Public Interest channels, and you've got a fair selection for that money. There's about $40 of savings per month just going into August. If you need local OTA stations and a directional antenna is out of the question due to your location, this is probably the best price you'll get.
Next up, cell phones. You mentioned you're in a Verizon area. Two questions: 1) How's Sprint CDMA reception in your area, and 2) if Verizon's the better provider, do you own your handsets outright and are out of contract? If Sprint is an acceptable provider, switch to
PlatinumTel. Those sorts of minutes between two handsets will average to around $5 a month for a total cost of around $10 a month for both phones. Check for coupon codes on their front page and at
RetailMeNot. Alternatively, if Sprint isn't an option due to coverage... your next best choice would be to port your Verizon handsets (if approved) and numbers into
PagePlus and sign up for their "The 12" packages. Still overkill, and about 2.5x the cost of P'tel, but the only other alternative for rural users is usually AT&T's network, and
H2O Wireless isn't going to be too much less per phone unless you buy their $100 account credits for year-at-a-wack airtime and you'll still have to find a couple used AT&T GSM handsets for use (which isn't hard, but still). Better details in the guide, and even if you go with P+, that's still close to a $60 a month savings.
With your internet service, it sounds like you can't do dry loop. Since they're offering unmetered DSL access, I'm guessing your local phone exchange isn't AT&T. Your only real option is to look around and see if any other DSL providers have access to provide to your CO. Normally I'd recommend
DSLExtreme as 3Mbps service would be $15 a month with contract in AT&T regions, but not likely being in the Deathstar's territory from the way you describe things, I dunno. Better details would help, and there's good info posted in the guide on this stuff as well. Even not factoring that, the above changes (without cutting back on the miscellaneous frivolities) could shave off upwards of $100 a month or more right there and that's with still having Dish.