This week’s Choose-Day Tuesday is all about how we chose to stop paying a monthly TV plan, but still manage to have all the TV we need. I originally shared this on my blog around 18 months ago – so it’s safe to say it’s been tried and tested at this stage! I’m so glad we made this change to save €650 every year!
In our house, we watch TV! Getting rid of TV in order to save money was never going to be an option for us. But getting rid of monthly fees and still watch all the TV we like, well sign me up!
We were previously paying €70 a month, which works out at €840 a year. When we started to look at different ways to reduce our monthly outgoings, we reduced this to €54 a month by dropping some of the features that we didn’t really need. However, this was still working out at €648 a year and in an effort to further reduce this, we looked into other options.
That’s when we came across Free-to-Air satellite television, specifically the FreeSat service. With over 90% of the most watched channels (and 100% of what we need) available to watch for free, it was the perfect replacement for us. I’m not at all an expert in this area, but what I know is that we still have all the channels we want, with no monthly fee. We paid a once-off €200 to get a Humax Freesat box from Amazon and it’s completely legal! We have over 200 channels, a really easy to use TV guide, we can record/pause/rewind, can control it using their mobile app and we’ve access to various Catch-Up and Players through the box.
The Freesat box uses the Satellite dish, so we just needed to pick up an aerial to receive and tune in the Irish channels, you can pick these up for less than €20. We haven’t missed anything from Sky, in fact aside from getting rid of a monthly bill, we haven’t noticed any difference! I really do recommend it for anybody looking to save money on their TV bills, we’ve been using it for over 18 months now and I’ve no complaints at all – we’re saving at least €650 every year and that makes me happy!
Like I say, I’m not an expert on this by any means, but do let me know if you have any queries, I’d be more than happy to help out if I can!