Sacrifice

Last Friday, our cable TV was cut off. Payments had been set up automatically to our credit card, but in the wake of our financial crunch, I took that nice luxury off automatic payment.

It was Todd's idea.

Well, it wasn't his idea specifically to remove the television service. When I pointed it out to him that we are going at least five hundred dollars further in debt on that card every month (even when we don't use it for anything other than the automatic payments) and that the bill will exceed $10,000 by Christmas, he said that we'll have to stop the automatic payments. I know how late fees and reconnection fees rack up on utility bills that aren't paid on time, so I did leave a few of the "essential" utilities on auto-pay for now. Cable TV didn't seem essential. When the bill came in the mail, I placed it on the stack of unopened mail on Todd's desk, figuring it would be a nice experiment--I'd rather risk him missing the TV bill than the electricity.

So, time went by and the "red" notice came in the mail. I put that on Todd's desk, too.

On Friday the cable was finally cut off. He seemed to handle it okay. (ie. I wasn't there when he discovered it, and even though a bunch of the equipment sitting on top of the TV incidentally happened to "fall" right around that same time, nothing was broken.)

When we spoke later in the day and I explained that I just did what he told me to do, Todd said that I should have reminded him when the bill came because "it still needs to be paid." I told him I put it with his mail and also said that I wasn't going to pay it because I know we can't afford it. [I didn't even get into the fact that automatic payments have gone a long way to preserving our marriage thus far, because they've cut back on the number of times per month I have to nag him--I'm done with tolerating that sort of existence.]

A couple of the kids were in the room when this came up, and they quickly agreed that they didn't need TV--there are still a lot of shows that we can view online, and there are other things to do. Todd seemed okay with that. I was hopeful that he might actually be willing to make a few sacrifices himself to dig us out of this hole.

Friday went by without TV. Todd spent some time in his recliner reading a book . . . .

Then Saturday--Todd had a job, and he was gone most of the day. When we got home in the evening, we watched a movie on Netflix instant view. It was nice. With the steady stream of television in this house, it's hard to get him to commit to watching a movie with me--it's always:

"not yet...just a little more news, and a little of this home improvement show, and a little of this crazy white-trash criminal show, and a little of this expose on short-cuts in the construction of golf-clubs... and, naw, it's too late to start a movie now. I'm tired. We'll do it another time."

How nice. The benefits of going without cable TV were more than monetary. I could get used to this.

Sunday, I was out with my daughter most of the day, and when I got back in the evening, Todd and one of the boys were watching a movie. I thought nothing of it--It was probably Netflix instant view.

Then, this morning when I got up, Todd was once again planted in front of the television--this time it was obvious that he'd dropped the loot to reconnect the cable, and he had likely done it while I was gone yesterday. In his world of fantasy, that's not debt spending as long as he uses the debit card and not the credit card--even though the expenditure means we have less available to put toward paying off the credit card. [Perhaps he should have gone into politics.]

It's almost noon on a weekday (work day?) and he's still watching. I could give him the benefit of the doubt that he must be on an exterior job, and since it's sprinkling outside he "can't work"--however, with this being the nature of his line of work, it just seems that he could plan ahead a little for these rainy days and either use them to drum up future work or at least do a little of the long-neglected interior work around our house, rather than just sitting around enjoying a luxury that we can't afford--a luxury that is keeping us in debt.