A couple years ago, I wrote about how much money we saved by making a few simple phone calls.

One of those calls was to our cable company, which offered me a discounted rate for two years when I threatened to cut the cord.

Unfortunately, two years have now come and gone, and our monthly cable bill recently climbed when our discounted rate expired. I had heard the cable companies are now much less generous when trying to retain cable customers, and that’s exactly what I experienced when I called Comcast this time around.

They offered a modest discount to the price we were paying for our triple play (cable, phone, and internet) if we moved to a double play plan with only cable and internet. Given that the potential savings was pretty low, we decided to dump both the landline and our cable plan, and now pay Comcast only for high speed internet service.

By finally cutting the cable cord, we were able to cut our Comcast bill in half!

Our actual savings will not be quite that large, however, as we added several expenses to compensate for the loss of our home phone and our cable service.

Mrs. ROMT used to lend her cell phone to our children on occasion when they were away from home, knowing she could use our home phone. With the landline no longer in place, we decided to add a third phone to our cellular plan, which our kids now share.

We’ve had a ROKU stick for several years for one of our televisions. Since we’re already Amazon Prime members, we decided to purchase an Amazon Fire stick for another TV after getting rid of cable, which has opened up a different range of potential viewing options for our family. We also purchased a couple of digital antennas, which provide good access to about a dozen channels, including the local network affiliates and public broadcasting.

Finally, we signed up for Sling TV to replace some of the channels we lost by cutting the cord. Notably, the package we purchased provides us with access to both the Disney Channel (popular with our children) and ESPN (popular with one of the adults in our family!).

The cost to activate the new cell phone and purchase the Fire stick and digital antennas was almost exactly what we now save each month after cutting the cord.

And even with the ongoing charges associated with the additional cell phone and Sling TV, we’re still saving more than 20% a month compared to what we used to pay Comcast for our triple play.

It probably took an hour of my time to call Comcast, order what we needed on Amazon.com, update our cellular plan, and sign up for Sling TV, which seems like a pretty small investment given the ongoing savings we now realize every month.

While we have fewer television channels than we used to, we’ve been watching less and less TV every year, and literally never watched the vast majority of channels we no longer have access to.

So all in all, I’m viewing our choice to finally cut the cord as a Smart Financial Decision for the ROMT family!

How much did you save by cutting the cord?