What's on T.V. Tonight?

It's hard to find ways to have fun with your family when you're trying to stick to a strict budget. But now and again you have to reward yourself and your family for working so hard at saving money at the grocery store and for spending less on the clothes your family loves to wear.

One of my family's favorite activities is watching movies together. This can be an expensive or not so expensive proposition, but through trial and error, we've found what works best for us so that we don't have to spend more money than necessary in this area of our lives.

Last year we broke down and bought ourselves a satellite dish. The dish was only $250 from Dish Network, and they refunded the entire amount of the dish when we paid for the first two months of programming up front. So the satellite dish was basically free, and the programming is a much better deal than our cable ever was.

For less than $50 a month we have five different channels of HBO, two channels of Starz!, Disney, and many other movie channels to choose from - more than we'll ever watch. We also record a lot of movies on video tape to watch later. This has saved us a lot of trips to the video store, and I know it has saved us a lot of money in a relatively short amount of time. Especially when going to the movies is our only other option. We never go to the movies at night and pay full price - the admission prices to movies are outrageous these days. Occasionally we will go to a matinee on the weekend, but if we get extra goodies when we get there we're still looking at at least $20 for the three of us. This is a rare special treat.

You can often find used videos at yard sales and at video rental stores. One day our local video store had all of their used videos on sale for $5, and we were able to pick up a couple of our favorite movies that day very inexpensively. They were still in great condition, too. We also often ask for certain videos for Christmas and for birthdays. That's how my daughter has acquired most of her Disney videos, and how my husband has collected most of his Clint Eastwood movies. We have very rarely ever paid full price for a video tape.

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