Saving Money on Entertainment
Guest Blog by: Midge
We are a one income family. I am blessed with the opportunity to be able to stay at home with my daughter and learn the art of homemaking. Shifting gears from two incomes to one has been a difficult journey and often leads us into interesting conversations.
Our latest deep discussions relate to having an entertainment budget. There are many options if you like to watch TV or movies in your home. But, they all have a price tag on them and not all of them are economical.
Usually it is the hidden costs that have come back to haunt us the most. So far in our married life, we have had to “purchase” at least two rented DVDs because they were late, lost or, worse yet, thought one of us had already returned it! We didn’t necessarily want to buy them but, whoops, they were so late that our debit card was charged for the full cost of the movie!
I checked out some movies from the library thinking that this was a less expensive avenue to pursue. We got to check them out longer than the average rental. But, we were still one week late on returning them, mostly because the library was inconveniently located a great distance from our home, and ended up paying $1 a day for each of the 10 movies we rented.
Did you do the math? $1 X 7 Days X 10 Movies = $70. Our local library had just changed their fee policy and the librarian was VERY apologetic when she noticed the huge fee. I could have purchased a lot of movies for that dollar amount.
In retrospect, maybe we should just work on returning the movies on time… that life skill would save our family a lot of money in entertainment!
What do you do to save money on your entertainment budget? Do you subscribe to cable or use some other alternative for entertainment?
We have Directv basic package.You have to ask for it because they do not advertise it.It is local channels and some other channels.We are very happy with it.It is $32 a month and never goes up.
Midge Says: That is an important tidbit to remember. It never hurts to ask! Thanks for posting!
We don’t have cable at all because we get our local channels without it. Instead, we have Netflix. It’s just $8.47 each month and we get all kinds of TV programs and movies. The TV programs are often a season late, but there aren’t any commercials! And for those of us who don’t watch a ton of TV, the price is right!
Midge Says: That sounds like a VERY frugal option!