Welcome to Saving Money with Andrew!
Like 43% of Americans (and >75% of Millennials and Gen Z), we don’t have cable TV. Instead, we cobble together our media diet with various streaming services. A few tips on saving money on TV and streaming services:
TV Tuners - If you care about local TV channels and don’t want to pay for cable or a premium streaming service like YouTube TV, you might consider a USB TV tuner. A great free option is a USB TV tuner with an OTA antenna. For well under $100, you can access over-the-air broadcast TV on your laptop (or regular TV) with no monthly fee. Tom’s Guide recently posted a Quick Guide to USB TV Tuners with a great rundown of affordable options for PCs and Macs.
Package Deals and Discounts - Most streaming services offer discounts for annual subscriptions or bundles. We subscribe to Disney+ for $79.99/year (effectively two months free), and Disney also offers a reasonably attractive package deal if you use at least two of Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+. Also, Hulu offers a $1.99/month student option.
Free Video Services - At least 90% of our kids’ TV-watching is through the incredible ad-free PBS Kids, which is also available free on Roku Smart TVs. Also, over 4,000 public libraries (including ours) participate in Kanopy, which offers thousands of films for free by just entering your library card number. While the recent selection is hit or miss, they have many hard-to-find classics from the Criterion Collection.
Free Trials - It feels silly to subscribe to services that only occasionally have new shows we’d like to watch. To save money, we often use free trials, making sure to set a reminder to cancel a few days before it automatically renews (see my guide to setting reminders). These trials are usually only a month, but Apple TV+ is currently offering a four-month free trial (to Target Circle members, but it’s free to join) and Showtime has a one-month trial with four additional months at a discounted rate. We also liberally use the free trials to streaming services on Amazon, which even let you cancel immediately and use the remaining month of the trial for free.
And now…Andrew’s pick(s) of the week:
Please run, don’t walk, to watch this incredible NYTimes video about how many of the most progressive states in the country are failing to address skyrocketing housing costs, education disparities, and rising inequality. Sadly, in my experience living among some of the most liberal and progressive towns in America (with extremely high housing costs), there is no issue that seems to unify people more than stopping new and lower-cost housing from being built.
Also, as someone who enjoys Regency England-era dramas, I enjoyed A Guide to Your 1816 Stagecoach Journey (hat tip to The Browser).
I hope this has been helpful. If you liked it, please share it on social media! Also, please send me your feedback, requests, and success stories.
Thanks for sharing that video! Education is a tough issue because what they described is so clearly unfair, yet to change would require a lot of people acting against their own best interest. Not that I agree with the current system but I am sympathetic to people who invest their life savings in a house that has access to quality education for their kids only to have that taken away, even if for the greater public good. That’s what real change would require, so I understand why it hasn’t happened even in those blue states that vote for it “in theory.”