The Budget

In yesterday's installment we said we'd be saving around $1,200 a year by ditching Comcast's cable service. That's partly true. The $1oo a month we're saving is actually closer to $70, since the other $30 went towards our Comcast-supplied telephone service. Why pay for a land-line when most of our calls come to mobile phones? We don't know either, so it's gone.

So figure $70 a month (x 12) is $840 a year we'll be saving without cable TV. Naturally, we want to keep the monthly expenditure of our little experiment well below that number so the switch makes financial sense.

Thankfully, most of the components we need are floating around our home. We already have an Airport Extreme, one MacBook Pro (mine), one iMac (the wifey's) and a Mac Pro tower collecting dust in the office.

We already attempted hooking up the MacPro to our TV, but the lack of a remote (no IR), bluetooth connectivity and a wireless network card made accessing music, videos and any kind of downloads a cumbersome affair that involved a keyboard, a mouse and a very long USB extention. In short: it sucked. We've decided to purchase a 40gig Apple TV to handle streaming duties to the TV, but we'll be covering the system in our next installment. For now, we'll stick to the budget and how much we estimate we'll be spending each month.

Here's what we have so far:

• The Apple TV set us back $250 ($229 plus tax). So that takes care of just over three months of cable service right there.

• Next, we signed up for the $8.99 a month NetFlix subscription that provides us with unlimited movies (one at a time) and unlimited downloads through our XBox Live subscription ($69.99 a year).

As noted by countless others, the problem with both iTunes and the NetFlix instant play service is the lack of downloadable first-run flicks. Honestly, this isn't a huge issue for us as we're willing to wait for something in the mail if we absolutely have to see it.

Before killing the cable, we both spent an average of $15 a month on various iTune purchases. Some months were higher than others (thanks to The Wire and Dexter), but after looking over our purchases and what's available to download online (both legit and... not so much), we determined we wouldn't be spending any more (maybe less) on Apple's music and video service. But just to keep things honest, we'll include $20 into our monthly media allotment for iTunes purchases.

So, the tally so far...

$250 - Apple TV
$108 - Netflix (12 months)
$70 - XBox Live (12 months)
$240 - iTunes (average, 12 months)
-------
$668 TOTAL or $172 in savings for the year.

Now honestly, the convienince of a DVR and cable is easily worth $172 a year to us, but if you figure that we were already spending around $240 a year on iTunes and $70 a year on an XBox Live subscription, we've already saved ourselves $482 for the year. And more importantly, the Apple TV is a one-time expenditure. If things stay the same, we'll be looking at a yearly expenditure of around $400. Not bad, and everything is still "On Demand."