Saving Money

I've followed the lead of Jaime in regards to money monthly. Recently the cable/phone/internet access as our weekend place went from the 12 month rate of ~120/mo to ~170/mo. Given we do not use this daily this was over the top.

Dropped internet from the cable company and am replacing with a DSL line from AT&T: saving $25/mo. Yes, it's 5Mb -> 768Kb but as I mentioned we do not use this often.

Dropped the all you can eat phone from the cable company and replace with a bare-bones dial up line: saving $22/mo. Yes, back to per minute charges but we just *don't* use this line much. I tried gizmo5 with an older cisco voip box but that does not work with fax lines unfortunately. Perhaps I'll setup a line-2 on our phones for outgoing.

Dropped the advanced cable with the box to basic cable. Dropping another ~$25/mo. Given we don't watch too much TV. I'd switch to over the air, but we really are remote and not much will show up.

And to top it off I don't have to deal as much with the cable company customer support - that alone is worth it. AT&T can't suck as much as this particular cable company support.

Course as luck would have it, I tried to save money last month with them and they offered to go from $170 -> $150/mo which was still too much. Explained that was not enough given our weekend usage and that I would absolutely be dropping. Told there was not anything they could do for me. When I called to drop the phone/internet services was told they could get me to a 12/month $99/mo deal - course too little/too late

Bit of a pita, but saving ~$80/mo or so for is worth it