Or are they manageable? The house you live in is taxed on its value. Lesson here is, live in what you can afford. Don't buy more house than what you need and can reasonably afford. Car payments? Ditto. Don't buy an S Class Mercedes if you're tight on money. The Chevy will get you to the same places just as fast. Food? This is a rough one. We all like to eat and we all have favorite foods. But again, with care you can manage your grocery bill. Grocery stores have sales every week and it's up to you to figure out where you're shopping that week.
Ah, utilities. Electric, phone, natural gas or oil for heat, and cable/internet.
You can lower your electric bill somewhat. I replaced all the bulbs in my house with LEDs. The bill went down. I turn off lights and the TV when I leave a room. For heat, I use a setback thermostat with a program to turn down the heat when we're sleeping and in the days we're not here. I also replaced all my windows and bettered the insulation; this will pay for itself in savings in just a few short years.
Up until last year, I bundled my phone with my internet and cable TV supplier in a combo plan. My anniversary with them was every March, and I could count on Time-Warner (the predecessor to Spectrum, the current company) to send me a letter telling me how much money they were saving me while raising the rate.
So every March, I would call up T-W and complain. The representative would always try to find me another "promotional" package; this approach was wildly successful. Somehow, they managed to roll me back to where I was and often, they would throw additional product to me at the same time. I got my bandwith increased from 30mbs to over 100mbs and I got a free DVR.. A few times, they got me to a lower-cost package for the 3 things they provided me. And I confess, the DVR was a nice touch. It allowed us to record some daytime TV shows we would otherwise miss. We grew fond of it quickly.
When Spectrum took over T-W a few years ago, things changed. The March phone call was a waste of time; it became a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. I didn't care for this. But I lived with it for a year while researching my options. And there were options, as there usually are.
I've had the same landline phone number since 1978 and didn't want to lose it, so I took it back from Spectrum and put it into a Trac-phone. The phone cost me $20 and the prepurchased 1-year time card was less than $100. FWIW, my other cell phone (a smart phone) is also a Trac-phone, ditto on the cost.
I boned up on antenna TV. I bought a small plastic antenna (Clear-TV) at a garage sale and tried it. Surprisingly, I got 28 channels on the living room TV and 32 on the TV in the den. Shortly after, I took the cable box back to Spectrum and told them ... well, I kept it polite. I told them goodbye. I bought a high-speed gigabit cable modem and took theirs back also. My cost dropped from almost $200/month to $65/month. Doing the math, I think I'm saving almost $1500/year now.
When I built my house, there was no cable TV on the rural road I live on. First I had an old Radio-Shack antenna shoved up in a crawl space and when satellite dishes became popular, I installed one. For years this was how I watched TV. When cable arrived (and how it arrived is another story for another time, one in which I played a definitive role in), I signed up. I canned my dial-up internet provider and went to high-speed cable. And I bundled my phone into the triple-combo platter they offered. And for almost 20 years, I paid the bill they sent me every month.
I've been tethered to the small plastic antenna for over a year. But I did climb up in the attic and take down that old Radio-Shack antenna. It sat there for a while until the next light bulb went off in my head: What if I put that antenna up and tried it? I'm quite used to living with 28 or 32 channels, even with the handful of shopping channels that my TV stumbled across when I scanned.
So I tried it. I put the antenna up on the chimney via a mast that holds my weather station (you can find it on Weather Underground). I pointed it Northwest at about a heading of 300 degrees and rescanned the TV.
I got more channels; quite a few from Syracuse (~60 miles away). Remember, I'm up on a hill at about 1100' above sea level. But I lost one set of local channels I was used to getting: WKTV, channels 2.1 through 2.4. But I liked the increase in Syracuse channels and didn't really want to lose them, so I climbed back up on the roof with a good military compass and tried again. With my wife watching TV, I moved the antenna to the south until I lost Syracuse, and then brought it back. The antenna now faces about 260 degrees.
I rescanned ... and to my surprise, I got 43 channels. A handful of them are home shopping channels, and maybe 3 or so are straight religion. But I never got 43 channels over the air before.
Sadly, I still lost the NBC/CBS local Utica feed (WKTV) ...but I have them from Syracuse. I have all the major networks (NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox) along with plenty others. In quite a few cases, I have channels I could not subscribe to on cable TV, namely: Grit, Comet, Charge, AntennaTV, Cozi, and Heartland.
Yeah, it's not great looking. But it's functional, and it's free. Johnny Carson reruns are on Antenna-TV every night at 10pm, and he's way better than the hateful malcontents who rag on Trump every night at 11:30. Nostalgia is great, isn't it?
I plan on constructing a small add-on to this antenna to see if I can recover the local NBC-affiliate (WKTV) by aiming it to the north where their towers are. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't.
But still, with 43 free over-the-air HD digital channels ... color me happy.
Here's a picture. That contraption above the antenna with the anemometer is my Wx station.
Yeah, I know, the chimney needs some work. Thanks for reminding me.
-Don
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