Blowing cash on movie rentals, Netflix and iTunes downloads

I’ve been opposed to having a TV in our home since we brought our G4 iMac home two years ago. Since it plays DVDs well, has crisp-sounding speakers (even at high volumes) and gives me a way to buy my favorite TV shows commercial free (iTunes), I felt like a TV would be superfluous.

The thing is, I started adding up our monthly expenditures on both iTunes downloads, Netflix and Hollywood Video rentals. You’re probably wondering why we use iTunes, Hollywood and Netflix. Well, every other month, my wife gets me hooked on some new show. First it was “Lost”, then “The Apprentice”, and now it’s “Alias”. The problem with Netflix is that it always takes too damn long for the next disc to ship and arrive, whereas with Hollywood Video I can literally drive five blocks and have the next disc in my hands within 10 minutes. And when you’ve just finished watching the last episode of the season, you don’t want to wait 3 days before finding out what happens next. My issue with iTunes is that with each downloaded show, I lose about 25MB of space on my hard drive. That adds up fairly quickly. So I started thinking, what do we actually spend on entertainment, and would cable TV make more sense?

So here’s what I calculated as our monthly spend on above said activities:

1. iTunes Downloads: 15 shows @ $1.99 = 29.85

2. Netflix Membership: 17.99/month

3. Hollywood Video Rentals: 10 DVDs @ $2.50 = 25

Grand Total: $72.84

Now, Comcast is currently offering a standard cable package for $45.69. That would get us Discovery Channel, The History Channel, Bloomberg, etc. So at first notice, it would appear that cable would be the more economical option, and would even include a better mix of entertainment choices. However, I have to add the cost of a new TV to the equation. Costco sells off-brand flat panels with extended warranties. I found a 27” LCD on their site for $599, which amounts to an additional $49.91 every month. So in reality, the cable/TV option would run me about $96 every month, or in other words, roughly a 24% increase in monthly entertainment expenses.

However, if we look out a bit farther into the future, and calculate the spend over 5 years, the cable/TV option would actually drop my monthly entertainment expenses over the long-term (assuming no drastic changes in pricing). If we spread the cost of the TV and monthly cable bills over the five years, my average monthly expenses would drop to $55.67, a 23% decrease. So although the initial expense of the TV is fairly steep, it might possibly help to shrink entertainment expenses over the next five years. Fancy that! Looks like I may be dusting off that Costco membership card after all.

       

Yes, I am a cheap bastard

I just noticed that someone here at the office has kindly lain a bounty of California Pizza Kitchen coupons on a table near the water cooler.  Of course, being the cheapskate that I am, I gladly took a couple (ten) and returned to my cubicle.  My wife loves CPK, as do I, so I’m thinking that instead of our usual Indian food forays this month, we can visit CPK instead.  The check at the indian restaurant usually runs about $40.  At CPK, it’s around $30.  However, now that I’m armed with these sweet corporate $5 coupons, I’ll bet I can get out of there for $25 (“just water, please.”)  That means that I can save 50% on going out to eat this month.  Yarrr…

Expensive food is bad for your financial health

Last night, my wife and I balanced the checkbook. We were both surprised at the cost of groceries for the past four weeks: $456. And this didn’t include restaurant dining, which added $180 to our food expenditures. This means that in the last 30 days, our average cost of food was $21.20 per day. We agreed that this was higher than necessary, and identified the increase in monthly liability to three factors:

1. More frequent, “smaller” trips to the store
2. Four visits (instead of one) to our favorite Indian restaurant
3. Three (expensive!) pizzas from Extreme Pizza

We usually shop at Albertsons, which happens to be just two blocks from our home, making frequent trips easy. The problem is, we found that by making smaller runs to the store, we lost the cost-efficiency gained from weekly meal planning and larger quantity purchases. Buying ingredients like ground beef and chicken to accommodate just one or two meals instead of four or five is much more expensive on a per-ounce basis. We also found that our increased visits for just five or six items for one or two meals greatly increased our chances to succumb to impulse buys. This month, we’ll be making just four, well-planned trips to Albertsons with a set budget of $400.

We had originally agreed on a biweekly restaurant budget, setting aside $100 per month. Last month, however, saw us spending $80 over our budget by dining out, including two $20 pizzas. That means we spent 80% more than usual…unacceptable (at least in my miserly opinion).

This month, by sticking to our original budget, I calculate that we will drive down our daily cost of food to approximately $16.66, a savings of 21.4%.