Dollars Now or Later?

It's August. That means that at the end of the month our household is no longer under contract with DirecTV, and we can keep it, cancel it and get cable, or cancel it and not get cable for our TV watching pleasure. I'm leaning toward cancelling it and NOT getting cable. I'm not sure which direction the man of the house is leaning at this point, though I have a feeling we're not exactly parallel... Sure, I watch plenty of TV, but I think it's mostly out of (unfortunate) habit, and because it's there. When I'm busy out of the house or we're camping, it's not like I constantly think, "Huh, I wonder which "House" reruns I'm missing today?" Every weekday evening at 5:30pm chances are VERY GOOD that you can find my husband ensconced on the couch watching the "NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams." And then I get sucked in, and then we watch half an hour of local news, and then at 6:30 "Wheel of Fortune" comes on and we usually watch that while eating dinner. Why? It's a mystery. I think of the cash that flows out of the house on a monthly basis for the privilege of having my brain turned to jell-o, and know for a fact that I wouldn't hand over the dollar bills necessary to watch TV every time I turned it on, if I had to pay for it as I used it. So why fork over the money once a month? I am appreciating this post over at Get Rich Slowly. I haven't done the math to figure out what the DirecTV bill is costing us in retirement savings, but I'm confident it wouldn't be a pretty picture.