The initial 6-month promo pricing on our cable package just expired and our bill this month went up to $140. We had been paying $110 a month for cable and internet including the sports package ($5), a dvr ($15) and leasing a modem ($5).
So I did what any good PF Blogger would do and called them up and tried to get my price back down. (In this case, calling them up means logging on to customer service chat). Didn’t quite go as expected and they wouldn’t budge on the price (even when I threatened to check out satellite instead of cable) and the only thing they offered was a $150 Visa gift card if I locked in at the $140 rate for 24 months (which includes a $150 early termination fee). No thanks.
Why lock in for 24 months at a price I’m currently paying? Don’t you think to lock in for that long you should get some kind of discount? I understand that locking in would protect me from future price increases, but believe me, if the price goes up any more, I’ll get rid of cable in a heartbeat. I have plenty of options like hulu and netflix to tide me over. Oh yeah, and I have lots of books to read.
All of this had me seriously reconsidering cable. Bird doesn’t really watch tv so she left the decision to me as to whether we should keep the cable or not. After putting some thought into it, I decided I would like to keep it which led me to look over the details of the bill and see if there was anywhere we could be saving. Basically, the only add-ons were the sports package, dvr and modem. I have the sports package primarily to watch English soccer and I’m a pretty big fan so I didn’t want to get rid of that. It’s totally worth the $5 a month to me. The DVR is an expensive add-on and one we could probably get rid of but we’re not going to because, well, maybe we save $15 a month by not watching commercials! And it’s nice to have all those old episodes of Glee recorded. Which brings me to the modem…why am I paying $5 a month to rent a modem when I can buy my own? I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t even think about buying a modem until now.
So I bought a new modem at Best Buy for $90. It wasn’t the cheapest one, but it will eventually pay for itself now that I’m saving $5 a month for the rest of my life. I only wish I would have thought of this earlier, since I already spent $30 on renting a modem for the last 6 months.
So my new bill will be $135 a month. I asked a few friends for comparisons and it seems like I’m on the lower end of what people are paying for cable and internet around here. How much are you paying?
Subscribe in a Reader
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
We pay 140 a month for cable. We have cable in both rooms and a digital cable box in one room so we have over 300 channels which doesn’t matter because 99 percent of the time there’s nothing on, lol. We also have the HBO package and the highest speed of internet you can go. Rambo is a big online gamer with his PS3 so it’s like a requirement for our household.
We debated this for a very long time, and the best package we could get would be $89 for everything. (bundled, no add-ons) At the end of the day we bought a converter box and rabbit ears and now pay nothing. Honestly, the only channels I really miss are Discovery and Food Network. Hulu, YouTube, and Netflix on Demand, totally rock. Sometimes I wish we had cable, but I just can’t bring myself to pay for it again.
Depends on your cable and your TV, but you could look into Tivos. If you aren’t using HD, you could get a used one on ebay that is about a million times smarter for less money. If you are using HD, that will be a lot more expensive.
Another choice would be to share wireless with your next-door neighbor so only one of you needs internet. Talk about cost-cutting. Even if you gave them your password, and they gave you $20, it would really help that bill without hurting you at all.
Around here, Dish is a lot cheaper.
We pay about $125 for bundled Dish, high speed internet, and a landline phone with caller ID, free long distance, etc. (I’m old-fashioned about having a home phone – I just can’t give it up).
We gave up the premium channels after the promo ran out and use Netflix instead, so I guess that should count as another $10 per month on the TV package.
We had cable for many years, and I liked it better than Dish for channel selection and reliability (Dish is fairly weather sensitive, even in the summer). Cable just got too expensive, however, and we wanted a faster internet connection.
Ok, so cable negotiating 101…
-Don’t take a NO from a person who doesn’t have the authority to give you a YES.
-Make sure you know the competitors cost and threaten to switch to the competitor (and be willing to do so)
-Use a lot of terminology like…is this how you treat an existing customer…you are going to offer a better price to someone who hasn’t paid for service yet…I am already a good customer who has made my payments on time…
-There is always a way to get back on the introductory rate, you just need to get to the supervisor’s supervisor, supervisor.
Just went thru the same exact thing at the same exact price! Here’s what we did
1) kept the 100+ channels b/c it has all the ESPNs & keeps hubby from going to a sports bar.
2) Tried to use our own modem, but that ended in epic failure where we couldn’t connect to the internet.
3) backed down internet to “basic” – not dialup, but the 1.5Mbps or whatever speed. $26/mo instead of $60+. And you know what? We notice no difference. We telework, email, FB, a little youtube, and a few tv shows; no gaming, no streaming movies. You might want to give that a shot.
4) note on the DVR – we talked ourselves out of one b/c most shows are online AND/OR if you have Comcast many are on OnDemand for free.
We now pay ~$91