B-School on a Budget: Kill Your Television

One of the topics I intend to post about a lot is money.

For better or worse, money will likely play a big role in your business school experience.  From living on a budget and taking out loans all the way to taking classes that revolve around money and getting into a career that has a focus on money (hint: no matter what job you take next summer or after graduation, there’s a good chance that having an MBA will immediately make you a ‘money person’ in the eyes of your co-workers).

And while there will be plenty of time to talk about the serious aspects of loans and budgeting, I want to start with one possibility that many people will never even consider:

Canceling your cable.

I know how incredulous that will sound to most of you.  I say that because it’s something I could never do.  The combination of cable and TiVo were one of the ways I was able to relax during b-school.  And so, every month I would write Time Warner a check, even though I was watching WAY less TV than I had before school started.

So how can I be suggesting this now?  Technology, my friends!

The rise of TV shows on the internet has made it feasible to get most of your favorite television shows via online.  By combining free sites like Hulu, TV.com and Joost with pay services like iTunes (this link points right to the iTunes application), Amazon.com’s Video Store and Netflix’s Streaming Service, you can pretty much get anything online that you can get on TV.

While this isn’t not a perfect replacement for cable — it’s still not as easy to watch some sports and live events online — and it may take a little tinkering to get the image from your computer on to your TV (should you want to go that route), you could potentially save a ton of money.  A quick cost-benefit analysis alone makes it worth thinking about.

And who knows, by the time you get to school, you might be able to watch NFL and college football online, too!

If you want to see what this might look like, I invite you to check out a series of posts from my friend Heidi’s blog, Caffeinated Venom — she’s doing this right now as we speak.

So, if you’re currently thinking about budgeting and where you might cut costs while you’re in school…this is certainly an option to consider.

Photo courtesy USB via flickr.

So, pre-MBAs, what do you think?  Ever considered cutting the cable cord?  Would you ever go through with it?  Current and post-MBAs, how did you handle this?