Pulling the Plug: Returning the cable card and estimating savings

Today we unplugged and packed away the two Xboxes, the Kinect, the Tivo (cry), and the large television in the TV Room. (What will we call it now?) We haven't watching anything on them except the Super Bowl since last Wednesday night. We still have the smaller television in our bedroom which for now will remain for watching only DVDs on a limited basis. If we end up watching more than 2-3 DVDs a week we'll have to reconsider it remaining in the house.

Last night my son went through all the Xbox game and set aside over half of them to sell. The others he is keeping so he can go armed to others boy's house for 'sleep overs.' My wife and son went through all of our DVDs (the collection must have cost us thousands of dollars throughout the years) and we are only keeping about one in ten. Any money from selling them will go towards a vacation fund.

Should Save Us Money
Speaking of money, yesterday I took the cable card back to a drop off station and called and canceled our Cable One account, savings us $771.12 in the next year. Disconnecting Tivo is going to save us $239.88 a year. Because of the DVD exception, above, we only cut out the streaming part of our Netflix subscription keeping the 2 DVDs package.  Still that is a savings $95.88 a year.

Each Xbox controllers use 4 AA batteries and we have three of them. We have to replace the batteries about once a month. At about 75¢ apiece we'll be saving about $144 in a year.

Then there is the Xbox Live subscription of $99 a year. 

Because of our low electric rates here (0.05521 per kWh) I estimate the two TV, two Xboxes and Tivo only used about $209 in electricity. Still it's more cash than I currently have in my wallet.

We estimate that we spend about $500 a year on the latest Xbox games (and their endless updates or expansions) and on DVD discs.

This doesn't count things like buying a new TV or Xbox if one went out.

So the total is: $2,059.87

After dinner tonight we play games together until it was time for showers and bed. We played three games of Jinga. It was a blast.