Frugal in the Fruitlands

Entertainment is a contentious issue in my household. This is in part due to differences between my husband and me.

He: finishes games and books consistently. I’m easily distracted (ooh shiny!) and I can count on one hand the number of games I’ve actually finished.

He: doesn’t have a lot of creative pursuits, long-term goals, etc. I suppose some people may see this as a failing, but he is actually a damn good example, I think, of the Zen idea of “goallessness.” He really does just live for the moment.

So it’s taking us a while to work out the monthly entertainment expenses issue.

He agreed with me that we should cancel Netflix until we get through our backlog. Netflix: cancelled. To celebrate, I’m going to put that $17.84 per month into savings.

The MMOs are the most contentious issue, because, again, his entertainment backlog is shorter than mine. Plus we both like games, but few games give us the opportunity for teamwork and togetherness that we both value - most multiplayer games are competitive, not cooperative. MMOs are good in this respect. Of course, there are other alternatives - but Matt makes a good point that a lot of these options, in the long term, would lead to us buying more and more $40-50 games. I guess we could rent them, too, but I just discovered that a membership to GameFly - the game equivalent of Netflix - starts at $15.99 a month for one game out. So… this is better than an MMO how?

For now, since our WoW subscription just auto-renewed, we will see how much we play it in the next month, and cancel if we don’t put any more time into it. It is less expensive than City of Heroes, it’s true, but if neither of us wants to play it, it’s not a bargain.

The cable subscription stays, for now. Neither of us really like the options we have if we cancel it. Most of our shows are available streaming on their respective websites, but huddling around my computer monitor is not my idea of quality “together” time.

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The Simple Dollar’s post today, “Maximizing the Free (or Nearly Free) Things That Make You Feel Good,” got me thinking.

If I read through my library of unread books…
Played through my library of unplayed games…
Watched all my unwatched DVDs or downloads…
Knitted through my yarn stash….

… it’d keep me entertained for the rest of my life. Just off the top of my head, I could: read the first four books of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, finish playing Oblivion (hell, play through the two Morrowind expansions that I never got through), watch all of Irresponsible Captain Tylor, and learn to make socks.

And this is ignoring such things as board games, which can be played again and again, and of which we have a sizable collection.

So why are we paying for two MMO subscriptions, a 3-per Netflix account, and cable? By eliminating those services, it would save us $188 per month. ($31.98 for two WoW accounts, $39.98 for two CoH accounts, $98 for cable - though that includes cable Internet, and they can have my bandwidth when they pry it from my cold, dead hands - and $17.84 for Netflix), or $2,256 per year, or $15,453 in 5 years (if invested at a conservative 4% interest and compounded annually). That might even buy you a sandwich in 2013 dollars!

Question to readers, and to my husband (the most important reader): How can we realistically cut back on these services and not resign my husband to a life of Wii Tennis?

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