It has been about 6 months since I finished my Masters Degree, which means I started getting mail from all my student loan lenders, cheerfully letting me know that the time has come to pay back all the money I borrowed from them. Student loans are great because they allow you to get an education even if you don’t have thousands of dollars sitting around in your bank account. However, the downside of student loans is that I will be paying them back for the next 30 years of my life. I don’t regret getting my Masters degree. I feel awesome, proud, and accomplished. This is only slightly diminished by the fact that Education is quite possibly the only field I can think of where further education and experience is a detriment rather than a benefit. Instead I am trying to focus on the idea that one day I may actually score a school counseling job where I can make a difference and help teenagers, thus saving the lives of the youth of America . That might be worth thousands of dollars, right? 
Anyway, I have to scrape together an extra $300 a month to pay my student loan payments. One of the things I cut out of my budget was cable, saving myself $80 a month. If I was being honest with myself, the only thing I really cared about on cable was The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert, which I can watch online at Comedy Central. Most of the other channels I watched, like Food Network and HGTV, made me obsess about food and freak out about how I will never be able to afford to buy a house. I used to put on the TV as soon as I got home from school until I went to bed at night, getting sucked into hours of mediocre programming and wasting my life. Not good. It just wasn’t a very healthy thing to do.
I did go to Radio Shack and spend $35 on HD rabbit ears, so I can get NBC, ABC, and CBS, allowing me to watch How I Met Your Mother, the Big Bang Theory, The Today Show, and lots of Jeopardy (This week there was a contestant on the show named Eureka – with a name like that you’re pretty much destined to be on Jeopardy). Also I have been watching more PBS than I have watched since I was a toddler. Antiques Roadshow has been on a couple times, and I watched a documentary about Ronald Reagan the other night. I have been without cable for a week, and so far the only time I felt mad about it was when Jennifer Hudson was on Oprah and I had to miss it due to detention duty.
All in all, getting rid of cable hasn’t been much of a sacrifice.
