My husband and I both retired within eight months of each other, which was lovely and also a bit of a shock to the household accounts. You know the pension is smaller than the wage. You do not really feel it until the direct debits keep going out at the same size they always did.
We went through everything that autumn. Some of it was easy — we cancelled a gym neither of us had been to since before the pandemic. Some of it was not, and the television was the one we argued about.
He watches the football. Properly watches it, has done since he was a boy, and the idea of giving that up was not on the table as far as he was concerned. I did not want him to give it up either. But we were paying more per month for television than we were for the car, and that could not stand.
What we found is that the money was not going on the football at all. It was going on a package built around it — dozens of channels neither of us had ever watched, wrapped around the handful he did, at a price set by the fact that they know he will not cancel.
Once you separate the thing you want from the bundle it arrives in, the sums change completely. We read through what a subscription in the UK actually costs and covers and the difference between that and what we had been paying was, frankly, embarrassing.
There is a name for what we did, which I only learned afterwards: cord-cutting. Apparently we were part of a trend.
He has not missed a match. I have the money back. Two years and neither of us has suggested going back.