We Cut The Cord (About in Half)

Our cable billing cycle starts/ends on the 5th of the month. On the 4th, Tamara and I marched into Cox's local "solutions store" with three boxes and three remotes and canceled our television service. We're keeping our phone and Internet with them, but we're done with cable TV, and from what I've been reading we're far from pioneers on that front.

Over the course of a year or so, I determined:

1. That most of the stuff we watched on the television came in over streaming services rather than cable;
2. That most of the stuff that didn't come in over streaming services could have come in over streaming services;
3. That as long as we don't insist on high-definition video, we could watch streaming TV 16 hours a day, seven days a week and not hit our bandwidth cap; and
4. That in addition to our main cable box, we were paying to rent boxes in each of the kids' rooms that weren't being used (they preferred to stream, and did so over their game consoles).

Even with the addition of a Sling subscription, which we may or may not keep forever (we took a two-month free trial and then pre-paid for two more months because doing so got us a Roku Express as a premium; it's a "live TV over the Internet" service from DISH Network), cutting the television out of our cable bill is going to save us about $100 a month. Which is why I've been yelling the idea for at least a year.