03.02
Dropping the Dish
We’ve been kicking around the idea of dropping our Dish Network package for a couple of years now and we finally pulled the trigger a couple of weeks ago. Our reasons for doing so are varied, but the main one was that it was getting just too hard to police it. The liberal argument for not using any content discrimination on the airwaves has always been “if you don’t like it just change the channel”. Well, that’s basically what we did… permanently. And I have to say that we haven’t skipped a beat. Our kids haven’t missed it at all, and my wife and I have been doing more reading and video games with our spare time. It’s really been nice. I don’t even think about it much, honestly.
Here’s our basic line of thinking: Dish Network costs $80/mth (or $960/year). We could take that money and re-assign it in our budget to buying movies, games, books, etc. and probably have more fun. The TV shows we do still want to watch can be bought on DVD for almost a third the cost of one month of Dish. And it’s always funner watching a whole season on DVD at once than waiting week to week anyway. Plus, this way there are no commercials to police(which is really annoying). The only sticking point was football games. In the end I just decided that the other reasons outweighed keeping it just for football. I can always listen to the non-CBS Auburn games on the radio, and just go see a few more games in person now that the kids are older.
The final reason was more long term. If we go ahead and drop it now, the kids won’t be used to it(not that they watched it much anyway). Waiting until they are 14 and 12 would have been much harder on them. It would feel as if we had taking something fun away. As of now they don’t even realize it’s gone. It’s made homeschooling for my wife much easier too since it’s taken that competition for the kids attention out of the picture. I just thought some people may benefit from seeing our thinking on the issue. It might sound silly to say it was a hard decision but it kinda was. Hopefully this will help somebody else.
