| By :
Molly Wider
Have you ever wandered through someone's home and counted the number of televisions? There are an average of three televisions in every home in Canada. And with our population having just passed the 34M mark, that makes for a lot of plasma. About 88% of Canadians subscribe to some kind of cable or satellite service, spending about 20 hours per person each week watching our favorite programs. That's a whack of dough, and a whole lot of time playing lounge lizard. Have you ever thought how your household might change if, instead of watching television 20 hours each week, you split that time into a part-time job, volunteer work, physical activity, and learning something new that interests you? Or what about more time preparing dinner as a family, reading together out loud, or family debates and games? What if you could get rid of two of those extra televisions (and their accompanying cables, wall mounts, and other accoutrements to run them)? Your electricity costs alone might take a noticeable drop, especially if those televisions are plasma or LCD-tvs. Add to that the hours spent on video games, recorders and other electronic devices, and, well, you get the picture (no pun intended). Some research suggests that as much as 10% of our total electricity costs can be attributed to our televisions and related gear. The thing is, our all-time favorite pastime isn't as cheap as we might like to think. And since Canadians spend most of their free time in front of a television, it's not a bad place to start to consider the real costs we incur for the activity. For example, both obesity and type 2 diabetes have been linked to increased television watching-but that even light activity dropped these risks significantly. What's this got to do with debt control? The point is that costs can sometimes elude us, or we don't consider all the costs when we buy or do something-like the electricity or health costs brought on by excessive television viewing. What is the real cost of not paying our bills? Besides the real costs of additional interest fees, potential collection, and lower credit rating, what about the family arguments, health related stress risks, and loss of self-respect? A price tag alone rarely tells the whole story of costs. And costs, just like multiple televisions and their add-ons, can creep up on us unless we carefully monitor them. How many of us might have thought that televisions could add so much to our electric bill or become so detrimental to our good health? We can choose to change it all, of course. It's just a matter of reaching for that $250 remote and turning that $2000 television off, and you've already begun saving money.
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