Breaking up with Cable

Cable, we’re done with you.

It wasn’t quite that dramatic, but close. After years of throwing around the idea of canceling cable and years of excuses, we finally did it and canceled our cable subscription.

The deciding moment had happened a week or two before at church when they were doing a series of smart financial decisions. One of the points was to not keep up with the Joneses, and that didn’t seem relevant to us. Fast forward a few days later when a light bulb moment went off in my head and I totally realized that HGTV was the equivalent of “keeping up with Joneses.” We don’t watch a lot of TV shows, so when the TV is on and we were looking for something entertaining to watch we most often ended up choosing a show on HGTV  At first it was really fun watching all the home improvement shows, but then night after night of those same shows and we started to grow discontent with our “dream” house that we had moved into not even 11 months ago.

“Well, we really need to budget to get granite counter tops.”

“Ugh, I would like this house so much more if the first floor was all wood.”

“Well, we can’t get granite on the counters without re-configuring the kitchen setup and moving the island around.”

Do I think of myself as such a shallow and materialistic person?  Not normally, but then one of those shows come on where a librarian lives in Alabama and has a 1.3 million dollar budget, and common sense clearly goes flying out the window. I mean, if SHE thinks carpet on the first floor is gross then obviously it’s gross and we need to immediately spend thousands of dollars to get rid of our carpet. I know, trust me I’m rolling my eyes at myself and my #firstworldproblems.

Please keep in mind that none of these things are necessarily bad things to think, but when you’re trying to catch up financially after moving twice in 9 months then those are not great things to think.  Instead of being grateful for this wonderful new house God had provided for us, we were growing increasingly discontent with it. That was the red flag we needed to assess why in the world were we thinking that way?!?!

We looked at our budget and realized we’d save a significant amount per month canceling cable. That coupled with not having a galore of home improvement shows available at our fingertips made the idea too good to resist and . . . we did it! That first night was awesome – our smiles said it all, we were pretty proud of this huge leap we’d taken. We light a fire and sat by the fireplace together chatting about just how great of a decision we had just made.

The second night? The honeymoon phase was over, so to speak. When the kids were finally asleep, all I wanted to do was mindlessly veg on the couch. However, having no cable forced my husband and me to talk (gasp! past 8 pm!) and choose a show together off Hulu. What’s nice about Hulu is that when the show is over – you have to intentionally choose to keep watching something with that super fun countdown timer. The power is in your hands to turn Apple TV off with 3 seconds to spare. We’ve gone from always staying up too late to always getting to bed by 930 because when the show is over we have to mindfully decide whether or not to continue watching a show.  Just getting decent sleep (seriously never happens with young kids) has helped us be better human beings and has made it worth it!

What do kids do without TV?  They climb a lot and take years off their mom’s life.

Even a few weeks later we are SO happy we cut the cord and said goodbye to cable. If you’re even remotely thinking about taking that step I highly encourage you to do it! I haven’t even thought about how desperately I “need” granite counter tops in like 10 day whole days. This is definitely a decision we’ll be sticking with.

Have you dropped your cable and your cable bill? Do you notice it has impacted your family life?