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Our House

Still Stuck with the Dish

Fast forward about 4 months… we still have DirectTV. Turned out when we called to cancel – we still have a year left on our account. Ugh. Oh well, we have our new system in place and ready to go come next year!

Categories
Our House

Ditching the Dish

Our DirectTV bill came this week. Ouch! The monthly charge is up to $125/month! When we first signed back in 2009, we were on a 2-year “deal” where the first year we paid $79/month – the second year $99/month.

It stayed pretty steady, then rapidly climbed to over $125 in 2013. I called and got it lowered by doing a whole home DVR package for a year. The price stayed at $99 for a year.

Where we live, we don’t have access to a cable system. That means either paying the extortionate price that DirectTV is asking or getting into the same cost spiral with Dish Network.

What we’re looking to do is get a Simple TV over the air DVR, an external HD TV antenna and an extra hard drive for the DVR. The start up costs are about $575 for the equipment. We own it. No more monthly box fees!

We have Amazon Prime, so we can stream quite a lot through that for free. We will probably subscribe to Netflix and Hulu Plus. So, our new monthly subscription total is $25! (This includes the monthly equivalent for what we pay for Amazon Prime)

The savings from ditching the dish will cover the equipment charge in about 5 months. To me… it’s a no brainer!