Cord Cutter's Diary

Guest Post: Time is money

[Editor’s note: Marvin Price wrote me this email last week and has graciously allowed me to reprint it here. By the way, I’m interested in running guest posts like this that offer a view onto other people’s cord-cutting setups, so if you’d like to share, email me.]

by Marvin Price

I did something different.

I was paying time warner the same $150 a month you were.

I got rid of television, but instead of just hanging on to the savings, I put it back into Internet bandwidth. I’m getting 50Mb/s down from Time Warner for $100/month now. By the way, you can’t tell me they’re losing money on me. $100 a month, or even $50 a month for just the Internet is pure profit.

There was still a savings of $50 per month which I then put into a AT&T 4G mobile hotspot.

So I’m essentially spending the same $150 per month, but I’m much happier because I get some of the best possible Internet bandwidth available whether at home or mobile. This matters to me much more because I essentially live and work on the Internet.

I have an AppleTV, a Roku, and I also have a MacMini connected to my TV as a media server.

The interesting thing about “Cutting the Cord” (hate that metaphor, because it’s not really cut at all), is that it frees up a great deal of time and time is also money. I seldom turn on the television. I noticed that the new Sherlock Holmes movie is available on iTunes now, so I’m having the MacMini download it. Later this evening I will probably stream it to the Apple TV and have dinner but that is  the only time that TV is on. It stays off most of time time.

I read more.

I work more.

I believe this is hidden value that isn’t in your spreadsheet. Time is money. Cutting the Cord gives you back time. You don’t feel obligated to see that episode of whatever. You get out of the habit of keeping up with television programs. Suddenly I’m reading two books a week when I was reading 2 books a month. That’s value.

The funny thing is I sit at my desk and the TV is visible from there. Only there is 21” iMac on my desk, a 27” iMac to the right of that machine, as well as an iPad and a 17” MacBook Pro. At any time any of those could  serve as a TV so I’m starting to feel like I really don’t need the TV at all. It’s nice and all, but I don’t get much more of an experience from it than I do from the 27” iMac with headphones on.