What have you cut back on?

Between last Sunday through middle of next month I'll have written checks for $5,240 (kid's braces), $3,000 (vacation - airfare, hotel, rental car, golf , etc.), and about $2,000 (payoff on Mrs. PD's SUV).

Damn. Just typing that hurts. We haven't cut back on anything other than eating out less often, but probably will start once we get back stateside.

 

The wife used to feed her old beagle Old Roy and the dog's farts smelled like it was being fed a mix of pig vomit and sour milk. I swear to Tebow, it came at you in waves.

In other words, it really stunk.

 

A few solutions for this:

1) Hook laptop to television. If you have a flat screen the TV should come with a port you can hook your laptop into. You'll have to get a line for the sound as well (couple bucks at Radio Shack). It's not going to be in 1080 HD, but if watching it is your goal, you'll be fine.
2) Get this. It's a portable HD video player. Just plug in a portable hard drive or flash stick into this thing and you're ready to go. It's less than $100 and is well worth it. If that's too much then you can try getting a cheap DVD player which handles divx or xvid files. $50 to $70 should get you one of these.

Now as far as supplying content...

You're on your own there, but it's fairly easy to figure out.

 

Have your daughter mow the grass?

 

Much of this was done before the economy crapped out.

*Moved into a small one bedroom with the Misses, an apartment walking distance to work
*Sold the second car. That was huge. $215 car payment plus $100 insurance per month, and that's not even counting gas and maintenance. All for a car-dependent lifestyle that I don't even like living.
*Cut my cell phone. It's not worth $50/month for a phone that's only needed during the miniscule portion of my day I'm not at home, at work, or with my wife and her cell. Got the cheapest Vonage plan for a home phone.
*Cut cable. Replaced it with the cheapest Netflix plan and a Tivo with Netflix streaming. I don't miss cable one bit.

I can't cut vacations, dining out, or drinking. Besides, it's not like I was traveling to the south of France or anything. Our vacations are cheap affairs: priceline hotels in cities mostly in the same time zone.

 

Like most, I've cut a lot. However, eating out isn't one of them. The way I see it, if I can eat a good meal for less than 8-9 bucks, I'm pretty happy. So when the misses and I go out, we usually ask for the doggie bag with our meal, then cut out meal in half and set it aside and we both have breakfast or lunch the next day. Now a $35 dollar for two meal just turned into four $8.50 meals.

I have actually upped our cell phone bill since it is our only phone. I want to cut cable/internet down as it is nearly $160 a month.

 

Based on your math skills, perhaps you shouldn't have cut out the calculator. $35 divided by four = $8.75.

Based on the typo, I hope your shop hasn't cut back on copy editors.

Based on your cable/Internet bill, try cutting back on the TV watching and the Internet usage and getting some exercise.

 

I should cut the subscription to the local newspaper. They put it online for free anyway.

 

My wife downloads movies, music and old TV shows. But she uses µTorrent and obviously gets the content from places around the world. Thus, when we make a DVD, my American DVD player does not recognize it. But our computers do. So we have to watch on the computer instead of my 51-inch HDTV.

Is there any way to make these DVDs recognizable to my DVD player?

 

They got rid of your paid vacations? That might be the worst raw-deal I've seen on this board.

At least with furlough you can collect unemployment. What a terrible thing to do.

 

$160 a month! Wow.

No seriously, this company called WOW has a deal now where you can get cable and internet for like $60 bucks. A few bucks more for an extra cable box, the modem and movie channels makes it about $75. Still a good deal though.