Ditch those money-sucking bills

Entertainment bills

As with phones, the same options that some folks dumped to save money were touted by others as a great bargain.

"Florida Yankee," for example, dropped a premium cable package that included all the HBO, Showtime and Cinemax channels ("finally woke up and cancelled that nonsense," Florida Yankee wrote, ". . . not sure why we thought that was a good deal???"), but "EveningLaw" swears that the premium channels are a money-saver for her household.

"We never rent movies anymore, just wait for them to come on HBO," EveningLaw wrote. "Yes we have HBO, but we aren't renting movies, and rarely go to movies, and we watch it a lot."

ElizabethM trimmed her cable bill back to basic service after discovering she and her husband "spend most of our time flipping channels then ended up watching something on a basic channel anyway." Her husband downloads the one show he's missing, "Battlestar Galactica," from iTunes for $1.99 an episode. The family saves about $420 a year.

A few folks are doing without cable or satellite television entirely. Poster "lawgrl6" disconnected her dish more than two years ago and bought a $30 outdoor antenna from RadioShack. "I no longer pay a monthly fee to anyone to watch TV and still receive plenty of local and public channels," lawgrl6 wrote. "So far, I have saved over $2,400."

"Poster ft12" also saved by killing the cable bill entirely.

"It took me months to convince my boyfriend that we did not need cable of any kind," she wrote. "I asked him for a trial of 'basic' cable and then logged the amount of time he watched TV; it was maybe 3 hours a week. When I showed him he actually admitted that we didn't watch TV. Then I suggested we take half of what we would save on our cable bill if we dropped it and upgraded our Internet and he jumped at it. He spends 3 hours or more a day online (so do I) so it made much more sense. We were paying close to $50 for full cable and now our Internet is only $30."

"PHLYo" uses a favorite trick of mine to keep cable bills low: "Every 6 months to a year I call Comcast and threaten to cancel my service … to keep them in check with their rates. I usually get a 6-month deal, but now that the competitors are offering 12-month deals, I was just offered the latest discount for a period of 12 months."

PHLYo also dropped satellite radio service, saying "It's not worth the amount of time I spend in the car or listening to the radio anyway." But poster "ssjc_152" swears by satellite radio. Ssjc_152 opted to pay a higher lifetime fee four years ago rather than a monthly subscription fee. "I passed the break-even point already, so essentially, it's free now," ssjc_152 wrote.

Flat-rate movie rental services that ship DVDs by mail were another entertainment option cheered by some and jeered by others.

Poster "umich24" saved money by cutting back to basic cable service and picking up a Blockbuster online subscription for $15 a month. But "rem2007" recently dropped a Blockbuster subscription, saying, "It was great for a while, but now we are too busy to justify the $19 per month."

"Hypersion," meanwhile, replaced a Netflix monthly subscription with Peerflix, a DVD trading community where people buy, sell and trade used DVDs. Hypersion wrote, "So I only pay for the movies I get instead of a flat fee every month."

Poster "debtfree004" uses another method to enjoy DVDs: Buy new, then sell immediately.

"We prefer to have our movies shipped to us new and at full price, watch them, turn them around for a quick sale on Amazon or eBay (usually Amazon). While this may seem less cost-effective or more expensive, we have an Amazon prime membership which allows for free shipping of nearly any book or video, which we actually get on the same day as the video store (sometimes even a day ahead!)," debtfree004 wrote. "We no longer have to drive and use gas to get our books or movies. . . . I list the DVDS as soon as I get them in the mail (and they sell quickly, almost without fail), watch within 24 hours and have them generally resold within 24 hours of receipt."

The gym

Some posters figure their gym memberships are a good value. PHLYo believes it's cheaper than the treadmill PHLYo was eyeing, and isnilk, a swimmer, saves money by using the gym's indoor pool regularly.

"Been going at least 3-4 times a week," isnilk wrote. "To swim laps at a local high school cost me a lot more per visit."

Poster "whatmoney2," who visits a gym two to four times a week, believes membership is a great investment in your health "if you use it, of course." For those who do go to gyms regularly, whatmoney2 recommends investing in a three-year contract.

"All gyms have these, and people are always leery of them since you're shelling out $500-$1,000 all at once for the membership," whatmoney2 wrote. "However, the major savings from these contracts is that at the end of the contract there is usually a very cheap annual renewal of $50-$100. In my case, I was paying about $40 a month and switched to a three-year contract for about $600 (pays for itself in 15 months). After the three years are up the renewal is $49 a year. That's about $4 a month . . . a huge discount."

Other posters found they didn't go often enough to justify the cost. Poster laterbloomer confessed to having the "best of intentions, but for as often as I go, I might as well pay per visit."

"Jersey Chick" agrees. "Oh yeah, as soon as we dropped the Y membership and started taking the stroller out to the park, we both lost a ton of weight. Kids don't give you a break, might as well make the best of it!"

Insurance

Several posters said they saved money by raising the deductibles on their policies and shopping around for cheaper coverage.

Poster "tbird_girl_56" saved money by dropping collision and comprehensive coverage on a 20-year-old car ("it's not a collector vehicle," she wrote, "just 'old' from an insurance perspective") that she only drove in the summer.

• Video: Living poor and loving it

"I justified this expense in the past by saying 'it's not that much' (and it really isn't, only about $60 for the six months a year it is on the road), but it finally dawned on me that if the car gets totaled, the insurance would only pay the book value less the deductible, i.e., maybe $500," she wrote. "So I finally got around to dropping this coverage and now I feel dumb for how much I have paid for this coverage over the years. Live and learn."

Continued: More ways to save

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