Frugal Television Viewing

People often look at me like I have two heads when I tell them that we don’t have cable. But it’s true… we don’t. And it’s by choice. We could afford to have cable. We would watch more TV if we had cable. We would be more in-the-know if we had cable.

Still…. we’ve chosen not to have cable.

There are a couple of shows that I really like to watch though. They don’t happen to be available via our rabbit ears and digital converter box now. (Funny that we lost one of our major networks when they converted to digital. ???) I didn’t want to get cable just to watch one or two shows, but I did want to catch those shows every now and then.

Enter Swagbucks. I know that you’re wondering what in the world Swagbucks has to do with watching TV, but read on. As I search with Swagbucks and earn Amazon gift cards, I keep piling them into my Amazon account.

Amazon offers video on demand for a very reasonable price. You simply choose the episode that you want to watch — and you can even watch a short preview to make sure it’s the right one — and pay for it. The ones I was choosing were $1.99 each, and they were two hours long. I thought that was a fair price. I paid for them with the gift cards I’d earned from Swagbucks.

I didn’t watch every single episode…. I don’t search online enough to fund that!! But I did catch the episodes that I was most interested in. I am able to watch them multiple times if I want to. Sometimes I let them run in the background while I’m working on my computer. It’s a nice way to entertain yourself without paying for cable!

For more great frugal ideas, stop by Frugal Friday sponsored by Life as Mom.