The other day I was randomly perusing the internet as I normally do. I stumbled up various posts on how to save money at
Comcast. I know a lot of people hate Comcast, but they are our only choice, and honestly, we have never had a single complaint about the service, ever. The only complaint is cost. Holy crap. I guess it was close to $200 a month for our TV, phone, and cable. Yeah, that is not cool at all.
I am not confrontational. I don't want to threaten Comcast by saying I'm leaving as so many people online recommend to do. I hate phone calls period. I am just not that sort of person. So how else can I save money without confrontation? So online I went.
IMPORTANT NOTE: My methods will not work while you are still in your contract time with the reduced price. This plan is for when your contract expires and your bill suddenly jumps up to not just an arm and a leg, but to an arm, leg, first born child, and a kidney.
We had the Digital Preferred package, 160 channels. I don't watch sports and neither does my husband except the occasional football game (Go Pats!), which is on network TV. I don't watch movie channels very often, I don't watch the majority of the channels we have. So why pay for them? With a few minutes of research, I found that we just needed the Digital Starter package (80 channels). I still get all the channels I watch regularly (minus Discovery Fit & Health, sadness) but that is a small sacrifice for the cost savings. I do use the HD DVR a lot. I cannot not have DVR as I go to bed early and all the good shows are on late! If I could live without that, it would make sense to drop all TV and do the Hulu for TV and Netflix for Movies like many people do. However, this plan was to get the most for the money.
The other thing with the TV was we hardly ever watch regular TV in the living room. My husband works all the time and I spend my time in the bedroom cause I have a serious case of laziness. So why pay for the fancy box that puts the guide on the TV and you can control with your iPhone? We had them change it into the tiny little box so we can get the digital channels with no frills.
We never ever use the house phone. Ever. I use it as the number to fill out forms I don't actually want to give my cell number to. Once again, why pay for something that we never use? The only reason we had it in the first place was it was cheaper than not having it! Silly bundles!
As for Internet. Don't touch my internet!!! We have perfect internet. Its the Performance speed level which is 20mbps. If we never have the faster internet, we will never know the difference as pages load plenty fast, Netflix streams great. Downloads are generally reasonable. Yay. All is well here.
Now, for the getting more your money aspect. I was reading a random post about how you can trade in your older equipment for the newer versions. Hey, if you are "renting" it anyways, why not? So out came our modem, DVR box, digital fancy box and into the car they went. At the Comcast office, we left with our same DVR box (and instructions to call in 2 days to set up an appointment for the X1 5 tuner (record 4 shows, watch a 5th rather than record 2, but watch one of them) DVR box of awesomeness which will cost a whole $2 more a month, but as we are saving so much, $2 is nothing), a new basic cable box, and a new Wifi enabled modem.
So to recap we:
- Downgraded from Digital Preferred to Digital Starter
- Exchanged a higher cost per month cable box to the basic one on the unused TV
- Cancelled our house phone completely
- Kept our amazing Internet
- Upgraded our DVR box from 2 tuners to 5 for $2 a month
- Got a much better wireless router/cable modem that makes our amazing internet even better
Overall we saved likely close to $40 a month while improving our services! We will see the exact savings when the first new bill comes in.
Just a couple points to remember....be nice. You may hate Comcast, but I have to say, they have been excellent to us for this change. The office staff was happy to follow our requests. We had some technical difficulties with setting up the new modem and cable box and both phone tech support guys were very nice (and spoke English!!). You get a lot further than being a screaming jerk. Also, keep your account in good standing. It just makes things easier and they are more willing to help you out!
I finished the bag pretty quick, but then there was a tragic problem....I couldn't find the crisps in any of my local stores!! The horror!! Online they said there were none within 40 miles of me!! Fortunately, they are wrong, and just this week they started showing up in the stores. First place I found them was Shaws Supermarkets, but then today, they were sampling them at my local Walmart!! So I grabbed 4 bags...lol, yeah, they are that good!! They are $2.78 per bag at my local Walmart (prices vary depending on area) and there was a $1 off 1 coupon you can print which makes for a good deal on an awesome snack!
