Freezing in NH

Free Money Finance posts about an article on how to earn $1 million by not watching TV. 

So what does this all add up to? Say you’re 25 years old and you initially spend $2,000 for your TV, DVD player, entertainment cabinet and gaming system after getting your first job. Add in monthly costs of $100 for cable, $10 for electricity use, $20 for renting movies, $25 for buying games and $20 for an occasional pay-per-view event, and you’re looking at $175 a month. Add in another $525 a month extra you spend due to the influence of commercials if you are the average person, and you are costing yourself $700 a month watching TV.

If you instead invested this money and received a return of 8% compounded annually over 45 years until you’re 70 years old, you would have more than $3.7 million in your account.

The numbers may be correct for an average person, but I suspect that there are a bunch of people who don’t spend that much.  At the moment I don’t have a TV, and I certainly don’t have 700 extra dollars laying around each and every month.  

When I had a TV, I don’t think I spent $700 (not including rent) most months, so if I was only spending $500 total on utilities, food, and everything else minus rent, $700 of it couldn’t be due to the TV.  And I had a very nice 27″ TV for free because an always-need-the-latest-gadget friend moved in with another similar person who already had a nicer TV.  So I got the “old” TV on permanent loan. 

Sure I subscribed to cable, and occasionally bought food that I saw advertised on TV, but if I wasn’t watching the TV I’d be on the computer (similar electricity usage).  So the TV probably accounted for $100-200 a month (cable plus excess purchaes).  Still nothing to sneeze at, but not $700 either. 

I got rid of it because I was wasting so much time watching junk when I could be doing other things.  I’ve replaced a lot of that time with random websurfing, but even with that I still get more things accomplished.  I was never one who could do much other than watch openmouthed when the TV was on, so it was a big imposition.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 20th, 2007 at 2:15 pm and is filed under articles, saving. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.