<p>Happy New Year, Everyone. Saving money is always a good NY resolution, and our bundled cable/phone/internet bill is a giant money sucker (up to $250+/month). And that’s not even counting what we pay for cell/smart phones. We still have a land line, and use the internet at home all the time because we often work from home. For TV and movies I have read a little about HuluPlus and Netflix and streaming, but I have to confess I am pretty clueless about how that works especially for current TV. We are big news/politics fans so we would like to preserve ability to watch MSNBC, CNN, etc, and premium cable series such as Homeland. What do you all do? I can think of a whole lot of better ways to spend $3000/year!</p>
<p>I’d start by getting rid of the landline if you all have cell phones that you use. We got rid of our landline a year and a half ago when S became old enough to have his own cell phone.</p>
<p>Also, see if there are any cable channels that can live without and can be dropped to lower your cable bill. Then you can investigate further to see if you can decide you can live without cable because you are getting your news and movies elsewhere.</p>
<p>The way that phone services are bundled, sometimes it does not save much to drop the landline which I do like in case of emergency or power outage. There is not much savings by dropping individual channels as they are packaged all together. Sometimes the movies channels can be dropped separately, but even that is only a few dollars per month. Lots of people watch TV on the internet and use netflix, hulu and such, but you need to know what you are doing, so that it is not a giant pain. The cell phone bills are ridiculous as well as they are not even regulated the way landlines are. I feel your pain.</p>
<p>We had the bundled cable/phone/internet and it was getting outrageously expensive and we never even used the land line. We finally got the introductory priced bundled cable/internet and dropped the land line in December by talking with the retention department and really arguing our case. We are saving $50/mo for a phone we did not use.</p>
<p>I called cable recently and expressed my dismay at the bill and talked about going with another service (Dish) and they found a way to lower the bill $50.</p>
<p>They almost always find a way to lower your bill if you tell them you are considering a different company. The last time I switched, the old company said they wished I had called them first because they would have lowered my bill. I pointed out to them that if they could lower my bill, then they must have been over charging me for a long time and I didn’t appreciate that! She didn’t quite know what to say. She ended up saying that they actually lose money on people when they lower the bill as they offered.</p>
<p>^^^ Has anyone every succesfully had their AT&T U-Verse bill lowered using this strategy? I know that it works with Comcast but I’ve yet to hear of AT&T cutting any breaks.</p>
<p>“I called cable recently and expressed my dismay at the bill and talked about going with another service (Dish) and they found a way to lower the bill $50.”</p>
<p>I do this once a year after they send out notice that rates are going up.</p>
<p>I call and renegotiate my cable bill each year. I actually was thinking of this same thing today. I’m not quite sure what I want to do yet. I really don’t watch much TV but I do watch sports. Everything else I can pretty much watch online or on netflix/hulu. I would like to upgrade my internet again. I’ll have to look into it. I wish I could just build a cable package with the like 5 channels that I want.</p>
<p>I also am thinking about going back to a dumb phone. 88 a month for this smart phone is a huge waste of money. My other thought is to go with a virgin mobile smart phone for 35 a month but I’m not sure how good their reception is. I really don’t use most of the smart phone features on my phone unless I’m away for long periods of time and I have a second smart phone from work which I can use to look up something quickly on the internet if need be so it seems silly to be paying for something that i’m barely using. I got a nexus 7 for christmas so that would be what I take with me on vacations to look up something online where as right now I look things up on my phone. I also work from home now so I am using even less features of my cell phone - Facebook on laptop instead of on phone for example. With either option that will free up 50 a month.</p>
<p>Great suggestion to call ATT. I cannot get rid of landline, because I get poor cell phone reception in home. I have to go outside to be heard.</p>
<p>I’m considering cancelling our landline. But we still have DSL and verizon tells us that if we now drop the landline, we can’t have DSL through them.<br>
I know that they are rying to force us into a Fios triple play and I don’t like it at all.
Makes me want to find a way to drop them altogether.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, we have Directv and each year I call retention and claim that DH wants us to switch to Verizon Fios and they find a way to cut 10-20 dollars off of our monthly bill.</p>
<p>We are going through the same thing htis year. I droped all the movie channels and am planning to switch my internet and Direct TV since Comcast has only dropped a little bit off the bill. Then next year I will go back to Comcast. My friends seem to do this every year. I am switching the landline to Vonage for 11.99 for 300 minutes since we still need the phone, but don’t need a lot of minutes.</p>
<p>musicmom, verizon has a triple play that includes direct tv - have you compared the costs to what you have now?</p>
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<p>I have to call AT&T 2 or 3 times a year to ask them why my rates are sneaking upward. Eventually I get them to find a way to cut the price. I was told that there are regular specials on Uverse Internet. Essentially that means they give you a deal that lasts for 6 months or a year, the price gets jacked up when the “deal” ends, and then you call and complain until they set you up with a new deal.</p>
<p>We just did this with Comcast- switched to the triple play. Price is around the same as we have been paying but includes home phone. Saves us our monthly AT & T bill which was around $70.</p>
<p>If you are a news junkie like me, there is really no way around it. I’m not aware of any way to get live news streamed from the internet. MSNBC, CNN,FOX etc are all apart of Direct TV, Verizon FIOS, Comcast etc. Its very frustrating. I watch very little television and only keep the Direct TV for the news channels. Pretty expensive if you ask me. 
But what else is one to do? </p>
<p>We got rid of our land line 6 years ago. Maybe longer. We have all had cell phones so no one ever call on the land line. It was a huge waste of money</p>
<p>This is interesting - [Intel</a> Is Reportedly Going To Destroy The Cable Model By Offering People The Ability To Subscribe To Individual Channels - Business Insider](<a href=“Intel Is Reportedly Going to Destroy the Cable Model by Offering People the Ability to Subscribe to Individual Channels”>Intel Is Reportedly Going to Destroy the Cable Model by Offering People the Ability to Subscribe to Individual Channels)</p>
<p>I’m curious to see if it will be successful and what the costs will be.</p>
<p>Follow Apolo Ohno, Neil deGrasse Tyson & Michelle Obama & you won’t have to read a newspaper again!
( Im only exaggerating a little- my favorite way to follow the presidential debates was to read what was being said about it.)</p>
<p>Just today I called Charter and cancelled our land line. I have been wanting to do this for some time. Recently we somehow “lost” the one cordless phone so we have only been using our cells for weeks anyway. I am also getting rid of the DVR box, since we rarely record anything and can watch on the Internet. All in all we are saving $40.</p>
<p>We pay $60 for DSL & our minimal basic cable that has about 7 channels. We also pay about $26 for the landline. We have never cancelled the landline and so far have no regrets about that.</p>
<p>Our cell bill will be quite high (about $240/month for 4 lines including taxes), but the kids really wanted to have unlimited data and the iPhone5, so that’s what we’re trying with Sprint for the next 2 years. The phones were pretty reasonable @ $128 apiece.</p>