A Small Savings

Lately I am constantly trying to find ways to save money.

Of course I use coupons and shop the sales at the grocery.

I've got the air conditioner set at 80 degrees. I tried 82, but my productivity sunk to unacceptable lows as all I could manage to do was sit quietly and drink iced tea, so I put the thermostat back down to 80.

And, although I couldn't convince my dear husband to get rid of cable entirely, I convinced him that we do not need the digital cable box for the tv in the bedroom. (Not the kind you hook up to your tv so you can get a signal even if you don't have cable; the kind your cable company gives you so you can get 1000 channels instead of the 99 your tv will pick up without the box). 99 channels seems like enough, to me, for a tv that we watch only for an hour or so before bed at night. He agreed. Savings: $6.00 per month. It's not much, but it's something.

On a side note, can you believe the cable company charges $6.00 per month, every month, to rent those cable boxes? That's $72 per year. I've had two of them for over 5 years; seems like they ought to be mine by now (can't imagine they'd cost more than $300 or so to buy new, if you could buy one), but they just keep charging me $6 every month. It's like the old days when you had to rent your telephone from the phone company, and they charged something like $12 a month for it. Then companies started selling telephones for $35 or so, and everyone went out and bought one and saved a bundle. I can't wait 'til you can buy the digital cable boxes for a reasonable price and stop renting them from the cable company!

Any other money-saving ideas or suggestions? Please leave me a comment.
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