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You can imagine my shock when I got our most recent cable/internet bill and it was hovering around $170. Yes, you read that right. Somehow, it went up another $20 from last months, which was ALSO shocking to me. So I finally took the bill and went into the local Charter Communications office to see what I could do to save some money.
Now, I know some people can’t fathom paying for anything more than the basic channels. We bought a new HD television back in March, so we added some HD channels, plus an HD DVR box (since my old TiVo didn’t record in high-def). We have digital cable, the HD bundle with DVR, movie channels and high speed cable internet. It obviously adds up. We didn’t want to get rid of everything, but we were willing to drop movie channels (other than HBO and Showtime, which air some of our favorite shows).
So after posing my dilemma to the nice lady behind the counter and telling her I wanted to drop movie channels, she did some magic on her computer and said that I could actually keep ALL of the movie channels but get rid of the family tier (about 40 channels that we don’t watch) and it would save us $38 per month for 6 months. At the end of the 6 month period, I will go in and negotiate again and see what their current deals are.
So we still have digital cable. We still have all the movie channels (regular AND high-def) and all the channels we didn’t want to lose (including the HD tier of regular channels). We got to keep our DVR that records in high-def (since we sold my old TiVo to my father-in-law). Still have the high speed internet. And we’re now paying $132 per month.
Yes, I realize that is still a lot, but we have not been able to break and get rid of our cable service (or drop it down to basic) because we enjoy watching a few shows each week together. This is one of our simple pleasures. Cable and internet will probably be one of the last things to go, if need be. Before we upgraded to all the high-def channels and DVR box, we were paying around $110 per month, so we’ve always paid more than what most people would consider “okay”.
To each their own.
At least I saved us $38 per month and we didn’t have to sacrifice anything that we love! That’s really what counts, right? 
