[lvhocken]

How crazy! The only reason we have any form of pay TV in my household is because we get absolutely no television reception without it. Given the option, I would give up TV altogether. It wastes time and we are constantly bombarded by advertisements which cause us to want to buy more stuff, wasting hard earned money on junk we don't need, plus all of this extra crap takes up space. I would say any form of TV is a luxury, but that's just me.

We have DSL instead of having long distance telephone service, so we use it to communicate with people that we don't contact via phone and I'm pretty sure it ends up costing less ... we pay bills online, talk to long-distance friends and family, plus I'm a student so I use it to take online classes, saving me gas money and wear and tear on the vehicle. In our case I would say it is somewhat necessary only because it saves money in other areas.

Books and magazines can be borrowed from the local library, so that is an unnecessary expenditure. I pretty much always borrow a book I'm considering purchasing to see if it's worth the money. If it's a novel, I don't need to buy it because I already read it. If it's a cookbook or something like that I often find that I only would have used a couple of items in the book, so I copy them myself and save the money.

I exercise at home, but I do find it interesting that there are considerably more people who feel that cable TV is a necessity than a gym membership. It's more important to keep up on the latest shows than to be healthy? I'll bet most of these people also say they don't have time to exercise.

My response has gone off on a bit of a tangent, so I should end it now.

Leah