Cord Cutter’s Guide to the Universe
If you're one of my Facebook friends then you're well aware of what I've been up to, lately. If you're not and you're interested in saving money without disrupting your life then you should read on!
Annie and I have a fairly modest income. That means that in order to do more fun stuff we needed to find places to save money. Our consumption of technology provided the biggest opportunity. So far we've cut well over $400 in monthly expenses and have given up almost nothing.
First, I installed an antenna. A salesman at a hardware convention gave me several to try because I told him that I was looking for a product that I could recommend to my customers. It turns out that the one that looked least likely to perform ended up being the best antenna. This is it:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00R3HFWNS
It's very compact, comes with a preamp, and installs in minutes. I placed it in the attic, ran a 50 foot RG6 cable (don't use RG59) to the preamp that came with it and that I placed behind the television, then connected the preamp to the television. The higher you can get the antenna the more channels you'll receive. We live in a one story house so ours is installed about 12 feet above the ground.
Even though it's omnidirectional I did find that I was able to perfect the picture by turning it a few degrees at a time until it was just right.
The TV towers are 40 miles north-east and 70 miles south-west. For some reason, pointing it due east gives me perfect reception from both cities-- 26 crystal clear channels, in all. (And we're in a rural area.)
I set up a personalized TV Guide at TitanTV.com so I always know what's on. I've become a huge fan of MeTV, Ion, and The Justice Channel and DVR about 10 shows per day. Since that's far more than I can possibly watch it means that I always have plenty of good stuff recorded on "Chelle-flix".
Even though I was grandfathered into the now-extinct unlimited data plan, on Verizon, I wasn't happy because they kept jacking up the price for the privilege. I was paying $229/month for my two Verizon phones with unlimited data and Annie was paying $80 for her T-Mobile phone.
T-Mobile is currently selling their unlimited everything (talk/text/4G) for $50/month and if you pay for 3 plans they'll throw in the 4th for free. We combined with Annie's daughter and are getting 4 unlimited plans for $150/month. That's $37.50/ea. We have very good T-Mobile coverage in our area so it works out great for us.
T-Mobile also has a program called "Binge-On" where they let you stream unlimited amounts of content from the biggest streaming providers like Hulu, Netflix, SlingTV, Amazon Video, etc., and don't count it toward your 14 gig tethering limit (the plan includes unlimited everything but tethered devices get reduced to 2G speed after 14 gigs of tethered data has been used. Your phone continues to enjoy full 4G LTE speeds, though). If none of your streaming is counted against your tethered data then 14 gigs is a tremendous amount of data. I'm a heavy internet user and I'm in no danger of going over the limit.
One other note to travelers-- T-Mobile lets you take your talk/text/data with you to Canada and Mexico. It's just like being at home. And you can roam on low speed 2G data, for free, in 140 other countries. That's a huge convenience and a big money saver for frequent travelers.
Once I had my T-Mobile phone I used this device to tether my wired home network to my cellphone's hotspot:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006DEBYWU
You simply set it up in "repeater" mode and plug your home router into the Ethernet port on the bottom. Your home network will now connect to the internet through your cellphone. (You techies might ask why I didn't use "bridge" mode, instead, and the answer is because their repeater mode is implemented with a bridge, so it performs both jobs.)
I knew, from experience, that Windows will happily piss through gigs and gigs of data if you let it, so I went into the settings of each laptop and told windows that our home network is a "metered connection." When you do that Windows behaves nicely and doesn't endanger your 14 gig tethering limit.
We run our business from our home office and still need to send and receive faxes. We know that there are apps for that but it's still easier to just put stuff in the fax machine, type in the number, hit "send," and forget about it.
We purchased a Magic Jack that only costs $35/year. I had tried them when they first came out and they were awful-- but they've come a long way. We have NO trouble with ours, whatsoever, and it easily handles our faxes and landlines. In fact, it was so good that I canceled the fax line at our store and installed a Magic Jack there, too. It works perfectly.
So our home fax/landline runs through our T-Mobile cellphone, too!
Since I no longer needed a cable modem, cable TV or a home phone line I had the cable company disconnect us. That saved $140 on top of the $160 we saved on cellphones. We also implemented some related changes at our store that saved a few hundred more dollars per month.
We're talking about some real money, here, folks! It's almost like getting a part time job to pick up some extra income.
We already had Amazon Prime (got it on a special promotion for $79), and we share a Netflix account with Annie's daughter, so we added SlingTV (which is only $14 for T-Mobile customers) and Hulu (the cheapskate $7.99 plan).
Out of all of them I like Hulu the best. Annie likes SlingTV the best.
Everything streams through the T-Mobile cellphone and we never have a problem with buffering or anything. Hulu gives us perfectly sharp, flawless, high definition video. Amazon is about 99% as good as Hulu. Netflix is about 98% as good as Hulu. SlingTV is a little soft (a common complaint from SlingTV customers) and is about 85% as good as Hulu. From what I've read they're working on ways to improve the compression methods and delivery. They're also adding a third ESPN channel, so if you're a sports nut who wants to cut the cord that should make you quite happy.
There are some free streaming apps that I really like, too, and I watch them on my "phablet" phone and cast to the television since they're not part of Binge-On and would count toward my 14 gigs of tethered data. I really like PlutoTV, RabbitTV, MobiTV, and TubiTV, and you can't beat the free price.
Annie and I like to travel quite a bit and, in the past, that meant leaving all our hard-wired technology services behind. Now we can take everything with us!
Between our antenna, DVR, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, SlingTV, and all the others, we have a ton of viewing options for a fraction of what we were paying!