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It has been 30 days since I made the deci­sion to cut the cord. Many friends have expressed inter­est in cord cut­ting, so I thought that I share what things have been like in the first 30 days.

I’m not going to lie or sug­ar­coat things — Not hav­ing cable is an adjustment.

The first week after cut­ting the cord, I swear that I was suf­fer­ing from with­drawal symp­toms.  Almost instinc­tively, I would sit down to watch a show, only to remem­ber that it was on a cable Ugh! No more news on CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN or FoxNews (Yes. Fox News I want to hear dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives.). No more Sports­Cen­ter on ESPN. No more Dex­ter or Home­land on Show­time. No more Mad Men or The Walk­ing Dead on AMC.

Irre­spec­tive of wants and needs, I have found that — even with­out cable — I can watch most of the pro­gram­ming that I’m inter­ested in view­ing. Inter­est­ingly, with­out cable and a DVR box, I have gone back to the old school way of catch­ing a show. I have to be home. Speak­ing of the DVR, one thing that I do miss is being able to pause live tele­vi­sion so that I can run out of the room with­out miss­ing some­thing. I know that you can get ser­vice from Tivo with­out cable, but I wasn’t will­ing to pay $20/month for the con­ve­nience. I am sure there are other ways to record and pause live TV, but it’s so impor­tant that I’m will­ing to explore the options. Thanks to ser­vices like Hulu­Plus, and other apps on my Roku box like News­caster, CNN, PBS, and NBC, I can view a lot of con­tent that I might have missed.

I thought view­ing sports would be an issue, but not so much. Other than miss­ing a cou­ple of Mon­day Night Foot­ball games and NFL Count­down on ESPN,  I haven’t missed any­thing. Most of the NFL games are broad­cast on over-the-air chan­nels. The same goes for col­lege foot­ball. In fact, last night, I watched the BCS cham­pi­onship game on ESPN3. I sim­ply con­nected an HDMI cable to the video out­put on my lap­top, and watched the game on my large-screen LCD TV. The pic­ture qual­ity is fine, and only occa­sion­ally have I expe­ri­enced any sig­nal hic­cups. Now, my son loves bas­ket­ball, so I have won­dered how he will fare with­out TNT & TBS. I con­tem­plated get­ting him the NBA League Pass so that he can watch any game. Inter­est­ingly, he said that he’s not inter­ested. (I’m so proud of my fru­gal son!) We’ll see if that lasts, though.

We are avid movie watch­ers, so Net­flix and Ama­zon­Prime have paid for them­selves sev­eral times over in just a month. The one adjust­ment we had to make was get­ting recently release movies. We have the option to use apps on the TV or the Roku boxes, such as Vudu or Cin­e­maNow, but stream­ing movies from those ser­vices can cost as much as $5 for HD ver­sions. Instead, we’ve start­ing using Red­Box quite a bit. The rentals are $1 per night for stan­dard def­i­n­i­tion discs, and about $1.50 for Blu­Ray discs. Not bad at all. We rarely watch more than a cou­ple of discs in a week­end, so it turns out to be a sav­ings, because the three disc option on Net­flix added about $20 to the monthly ser­vice cost.

What else? Oh…reception. I have fared pretty well with the anten­nas that I ref­er­enced in my ini­tial piece. I have noticed that any­time a freight train rolls by, the sig­nal on cer­tain chan­nels gets pix­e­lated until it passes. I’ve read about this online, and most sites don’t think trains should inter­fere. Those folks only need come to my house to see it play out. It can be annoy­ing if it’s a long train. I sus­pect that the only way to resolve that issue is to mount an antenna in the attic or on the roof, so as  to get above the inter­fer­ence. For the time being, I am not will­ing to go that route, so I will put up with the inter­mit­tent disruptions.

I find that the time I often spent watch­ing tele­vi­sion is now filled with me read­ing and writ­ing more than before. Some­thing that dove­tails nicely into my Oper­a­tion Twenty12 project. As is nor­mally the case, I am often lis­ten­ing to music. Hav­ing Pan­dora avail­able as an app on the Roku boxes is a nice fea­ture to have. It may just be in my head, but I feel more relaxed and it seems qui­eter in the house, too.

So, there you have it. All in all, cord cut­ting has been a rel­a­tively pain­less expe­ri­ence. Aside from the first week (your mileage may vary) — my shaky, detox period — life has been good. It is par­tic­u­larly pleas­ant when I see my cable bill cut from $190 down to $55. Even when you add in the cost of Hulu­Plus and Net­flix ($8 each/month), I’m still sav­ing a good amount of cash. The bot­tom line is that I don’t feel like I am miss­ing anything.

End Note: It is worth clar­i­fy­ing my open­ing state­ment. I wrote,  “I made the deci­sion to cut the cord.” In all fair­ness, it was really a fam­ily deci­sion. Well…sort of. I dis­cussed cut­ting the cord with my wife and son for quite a while before act­ing. Given that I talked about it for sev­eral months, I don’t know if they thought that I was really seri­ous. They were a bit sur­prised when they saw all the DVR and cable boxes were gone, and the land­line was dead. Nev­er­the­less, the moral of the store here is: Deci­sions that affect the entire fam­ily must be made together.