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We all know that sitting in front of the television for more than 30 minutes a day is bad for our health. It makes our bottoms get bigger, and turns our brains to mush (according to Hulu advertisements that is). We push our kids to get outside and play and be active. We are doing it to have them active and moving their bodies. Did you know that by turning off the television you can also save money, lots of money.

I understand, we all like to sit and catch our favorite show after a hard day of work. We love the football games, the golf tournaments and so on. If you are like me, I occasionally have the television on in the background just so that there is noise when I am working. Few of us have ever stopped to think about how much watching television actually costs us.

According to Juliet Schor from Boston College, she has figured that an hour of television a week costs each of us $200 a year. Her theory is based in part to the fact that when we sit in front of the boob tube and enjoy our favorite show we experience an “upscaling of desire” to buy things. This theory has gone big time, CNN has reported that if you watch a handful of sitcoms and a reality series or two you and I are going to end up spending an extra thousand a year… just for watching those shows.

Hmmm… $200 a year, for just an hour a week, who actually only watches an hour a week? If your family is similar to mine, we catch the news in the morning and in the evening and we have one show a night that we watch as a family. So on average that is 3 hours a day, 15 hours a week only looking at Monday through Friday. Let’s examine the $200 here. That breaks down to $3.85 per hour of television. So for our family that is almost $58 a week that we could be saving if we cut out that T.V. time. That is $3,016 a year if we only cut out the television through the week, honestly I don’t want to think about what we are spending on the weekends.

Ok, let’s take out the enticement to go out and buy something. Chances are you that you have cable or satellite television. Depending on the package is running you anywhere from $29.99 to $300 a month, which means that if you were to give up television… or at least enhanced television you would be saving yourself anywhere from $360 - $3600 year! This isn’t even taking into consideration the cost of the electricity to run the television!

I can tell you that my household has had to step back and take a look at our television habits. We have figured out that we were to cut out viewing television we will save $5416 a year. Now giving up T.V. may make you cringe, so consider changing the programming you. We are giving up the satellite package we have, because we don’t watch more than half of the channels anyway and we are saving $2400 a year. That is enough for a decent family vacation!

Neil Bartlett is the founder of CheapInsider.com. Cheap Insider provides everyone with Tips and Techniques for saving money and finding bargains. To learn more INSTANTLY grab his FREE report “10 Money Saving Tips”