Is it really possible to live life without cable TV?  Yes, yes it is.  I’ve been doing it for the past 9 years.  You might think the reason was economics, and sure that played a part, but the real reason was the feeling I had after a night of television.  I felt unproductive and lazy.

I found myself mostly watching home improvement shows or nature shows.  While these shows aren’t necessarily bad, I felt like the time I spent watching them was wasted.  I really didn’t learn enough about home improvement to turn my house into a mansion, and in all actuality, I can’t remember any tips that were worth all the time I spent watching.  And all that nature knowledge has yet to be proven useful.  Maybe next time I see a tiger staring me down at the grocery store, I’ll wish I had watched more Discovery channel.  But until then, I’ve found all that television to be a waste of time.

So, we took the plunge.  When we moved into our house 9 years ago, we decided to go without cable TV.  For the sake of full disclosure, we did get the very basic cable, which comes with mostly local broadcast channels, about 10 total.  It only costs $10 per month, and since we are a cable subscriber we get a $15 dollar discount on our cable Internet.  Looks like we stumbled upon a small loop hole, plus we don’t have to deal with a TV antenna.

The choice to ditch the cable started some time before moving into our house.  We decided to conduct a little experiment to turn off the TV for an entire week.  No TV at all for one week.  Going into it, I wasn’t sure how the week would unfold.  Like most households, I would come home from work and spend most of the evening lounging on the couch watching TV.  I wondered how I would occupy my time.

We decided to just jump right into it, and here’s how it went.  I spent a lot of time reading.  It was nice to have additional time to read, but the real bonus was I could read in quiet.  There were no noisy distractions.  I spent more time talking with my wife.  We could chat about the day or ponder the mysteries of the universe.  Once again, no distractions.  We were able to spend more time cooking.  No rush to get through cooking or eating dinner just so we could catch some “must see” TV.  The thing I remember the most from our “No TV Week” was the quiet.  All week I came home to a silent peaceful environment.

It might make a good story if I told you we decided to give up TV completely, but we didn’t.  We allowed the TV back into our lives.  When it came back though, it was no longer allowed to consume our evenings.  We were more mindful about what we watched.  The evening news was no longer allowed, as we saw the constant stream of negativity as detrimental to our peaceful evenings.  We applied a loose rule to TV programs that they had to be better than watching a movie.  If we would pay the cost of a movie rental, then it may be worth watching.

The “No TV Week” allowed us to look more objectively about what we wanted to watch on TV.  From this, we determined that we weren’t watching near as much Cable TV as we had thought.  Most of the shows we watched were on regular network TV.   Looking at the cost of $60 a month for standard cable, we figured we had to have at least 10 movie quality shows per month.  That just didn’t pan out.  We didn’t watch that many movie quality TV shows on cable in any given month.  So, when it came time to move into our house, we didn’t sign up for Cable.  I haven’t missed it in the least.

Have you ever tried a No TV experiment?  Have you considered giving up cable TV?  I’d love to hear from you.

In my late twenties (I’m 35 now) my wife and I made the decision to crawl out from our pile of debt.  To summarize our situation, we had a bit of credit card debt and a couple of car loans.  The plan of attack was similar to Dave Ramsey’s baby steps, but we started before we heard of his plan.  We kept about $1000 in the bank as an emergency fund.  Then we made a budget.  This was eye opening, as we could really see what we were spending, and how much money we were wasting each month in interest.

This was our initial inspiration, to stop wasting money on interest payments. We were wasting hundreds of dollars each and every month, just because we bought “stuff” on credit cards and cars through bank financing.  We started off strong, attacking debt.  We cut back on all unnecessary expenses; we stopped eating out, we cancelled our cable TV, we stopped buying stuff.

It felt great for a while.  But cutting back is hard, and eventually the novelty wore off.  We found our desire for “stuff” beginning to grow.  I needed inspiration.  I’d like to share with you, the ways we found inspiration to keep going.

The first big boost to our inspiration was hearing about Dave Ramsey.  I bought his book, “The Total Money Makeover.” Actually, what I thought was a paperback version turned out to be the workbook (note to Dave Ramsey: The giant word “Workbook” written across the cover wasn’t enough for me to notice the difference.)  In any case, it contained much of the same information as the real book, and it got us supercharged.  We officially began working the baby steps.  We worked on the smallest debt first, and paid minimums on everything else.  We were making good progress.

Months went by, and living within our means was still tough.  We had our goal, but it seemed like it would take forever to reach it.  The inspiration was slowly waning.  The one thing that kept me going through the ups and downs of our new “living below our means” lifestyle was listening to Dave Ramsey’s radio program. Hearing about other people that were in our situation or worse even, and seeing how they managed to overcome debt.  I especially liked his Friday shows where he encouraged folks to call in and scream “I’m debt free.”

As we entered our thirties, my wife and I started thinking about having a child.  We knew that if we were going to have a child, we wanted her to be able to stay home and raise this child.  This was inspiration number four.  To be able to live on one income in order to support a stay at home mom and a new baby. This is where we got fanatical about paying off debt.  To find out if we could get by on one income, we practiced it.  We lived on my income, and all hers (minus working expenses) went to pay down debt.  We also took every bit of bonus, tax return, and gifts, and added it to our debt snowball.

It took us about three years to get out of debt.  During that time, we needed to constantly reach for inspiration to keep going.  It was tough to realize that we weren’t as rich as we thought we were, and to start living within our means.  We did it though, by the time our daughter was born, we were debt free, and my wife was able to stay home to raise our daughter.  I can think of no better reward for our hard work and dedication.

Here’s the quick list of the inspirations that kept us going.

1. Establishing a reason to get out of debt
2. Reading about strategies and success stories
3. Listening to strategies and success stories
4. Setting a goal (of life changing proportions)

Those are the sources of inspiration that worked for me.  Your situation may be different or you may have different inspiration, and that’s ok.  What’s important is that you find your own inspiration, and use it to keep you going on your path to success.

We’ve been out of debt for nearly four years.  One of the benefits I didn’t realize at the time is the reduction of money related stress.  All those bills are stressful.  We now have less stress and less worry.  Another benefit which I certainly didn’t foresee was being able to weather a 3 month layoff due to being debt free and having an emergency fund.  Actually, it was more than just “weathering;” I was able to relish it.  I was able to enjoy every second of unemployment spending quality time with my family.

Are you working towards a debt free lifestyle?  What are your inspirations?  I’d love to hear from you.

Image by TomJByrne

“Every person is surrounded by a thought atmosphere…Through this power we are either attracting or repelling. Like attracts like and … we attract just what we are in mind.”-Ernest Holmes

I am feeling so happy and excited, because The Law of Manifestation has done it to me again. And I want to share this feeling with you.

Around three years ago, I started my career in door to door vacuum sales. I never forgot the story my mentor, this Millionaire Guy, gave us about how The Law of Attraction helped him get where he was. He said “if it wasn’t for The Law of Attraction he would not be a multi-millionaire”. I knew then that if this Millionaire Guy believed in this SH@#!! (excuse my French), I had to start doing the things he did and thinking how he did.

I remember that same day something crazy happened to me that led me to really believe this SH@#! And from that moment on I told myself that I would never think like the average person again; and I would think about every detail of how I wanted my life to be!

That day our mentor made us do a silly exercise that I will never forget; he told us to write down how many vacuums we wanted to sell for that day, week, and month. He told us to close our eyes and picture what it would feel to sell those vacuums and to imagine those checks in our hands when we got them.

I remember that half of our team did this exercise and the other half just didn’t believe in this SHIT!, and thought this was some mumbo jumbo. Well, I guess that’s why they were so successful. But I was dumb enough to listen and smart enough to do it.

As he said it, not everyone would do it, but those who would, would win the trip to Puerto Rico. The ones that did it didn’t sell what they wrote down, but did go on a trip.

A more recent story, just a few weeks ago to be precise I wanted to network with bloggers that were in the same niche as me and had the same beliefs as I did. So I decided to start applying the Laws of Manifestation as I do with everything else. As you can imagine, yes, it manifested, and it is why you are able to read this story.

Just a week ago I landed somehow at The Skool of Life. I was curious, so I decided to read a few articles and listen to an interview that Srinivas did with Jared from Under30 CEO. I can remember him talking about launching a multi-author blog and wanting to connect with new bloggers, it was then that I knew that Universe that opened up for me to connect with him. I sent him an email and here I am thanks to the Laws again.

If you truly believe that you can attract anything to your life through thinking and believing in your thoughts. You are right.

For those of you that would like to apply the Law of Manifestation I recommend “The Law of Attraction” or “The Secret” these are great resources that can help you understand these laws.

I can understand that for somebody new, this could be difficult to take in. I certainly didn’t think that what this Millionaire Guy taught me would ever change my thinking. All I know is that I was dumb enough to listen, smart enough to do it.

If you have a story related to The Law of Attraction I would love to get some feedback and get some comments on how it has help you achieve anything please share it.