We’re saying “goodbye” to cable TV in a few weeks. Time Warner’s clusterfudge over bandwidth-based pricing was the impetus that nudged us to finally make a call on keeping cable or not. It feels good to make the decision. We’re not going dark or moving “off the grid,” we’re just simplifying here and there.
Last year we started growing herbs & some vegetables. This year we’re hoping to add to that with a raised veggie bed. We did some rearranging of living and work spaces and we’re planning on adding more social spaces in the backyard to take advantage of nice weather.
Canceling cable is just one more part of finding ways to come together and be more of a family. It also has what should be obvious monthly savings. That chunk of cash each month can be used to pay down debt.
We’re not alone in this. USA Today ran a story – though oddly off-target – featuring a family that was shifting to a simpler life in order to save money and be more self-sufficient. Peggy Noonan writes about them in the Wall Street Journal:
The paper weirdly headlined them “economic survivalists,” which perhaps reflected an assumption that anyone who leaves a conventional, material-driven life for something more physically rigorous but emotionally coherent is by definition making a political statement. But it didn’t look political from the story they told. They didn’t look like people trying to figure out how to survive as much as people trying to figure out how to live. The picture that accompanied the article showed a happy family playing Scrabble with a friend.
Noonan goes on to make predictions of an America in the near future with less “bland affluence” and more normalcy, less chic, an a questioning of much of today’s mega-excesses. Sounds fine to me.