January Budgeting is never fun. I always seem to go a bit overboard during Christma… The Holida… a non-descript time of celebratio… December!

Now that that month is over, we realized that our budget needs a bit more trimming than our Christmas tree.

I decided the first thing to go would have to be our cable bills.

Right now we use Comcast for everything
Comcast Internet
Comcast Telephone
Comcast Digital Cable
Comcast Diaper Service

The total for the services (before tax… or as we say in Minnesota: TAX) was $99. Well, their Christmas gift to us was a $20 rate hike. The new total was $119

Now, because I subcribed to a special package, I couldn’t just throttle one of the services back. If I cut back on one, the others go up, so the service is pretty much the same.

So, we decided to do some shopping, and make some sacrifice.

First, we moved our phone back to Qwest’s $15 basic plan.

Then we cut our cable back to the basic $9 per month. No more ESPN, No more Myth Busters, No more … I guess that’s about it.

(Our girls will be without their Disney Channel programs. You can contribute to the “Give the Girls their Disney Channel Programming Fund” by clicking on the following button.

The next step was to figure out what to do with our Internet. We went with the Qwest DSL 1.5mb service with Qwest Basic ISP. It was only about $10 cheaper than cable, but I wouldn’t mind having the dedicated bandwith into my home.

All in all, the cost cutting saved us about $40 on the new Comcast charges.

In the interest of full disclosure, I do own a little Qwest stock, but only because it is so cheap.