Poorer Than You

Money: It's Not Just For Rich People

How I Spend $20 (or less) Per Year Streaming Movies and TV

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Streaming video doesn't have to break the budget

[I’ve been talking to an old college friend (ha! old! college was like 7 years ago!) about how much he spends on certain things and services that, well, the rest of us pay probably-way-too-much for. When he said that he paid $20/year for all of his streaming video, I dared him to prove it, in writing, here on the blog. So here you go – his anonymous guest post on how he does it:]

 

I don’t own a TV and I don’t pay for cable television. I don’t subscribe to Netflix because I don’t watch enough to justify the $7.99/month cost. I used to subscribe to Amazon Prime but $99/year is more than the service is worth to me. Hulu doesn’t have the content I want (I mostly watch films rather than television). The service that has the greatest number of interesting titles is Netflix’s disc-by-mail service, which would be great, if not for the fact that it costs the same $7.99/month as the streaming service (or $4.99/month for max two discs per month). I watch perhaps one or two movies in a month, want to spend about $20/year for that purpose, and I certainly can’t be bothered to walk to a physical Redbox.

So, how can one spend only $20 per year on movies and television? Well for starters, with free trials, of course!

New customers can get free trials of:

There is some content-overlap between services, so you could cancel your existing subscriptions, and still watch some of the same things while trying out these other options. [Editor’s note: I highly recommend checking CanIStream.it to see which streaming services your favorite shows are on!]

And it’s surprising how often free trials come around for previous (and not just first-time) customers (although I had been a Netflix subscriber on-and-off between 2006 and 2012, which perhaps explains why they give me free things so often.) Within the last three years, I have received free trials of these services without being a new customer:

  • Hulu, August 2016
  • DVD.com (Netflix disc service), May 2016
  • Hulu, April 2016
  • Netflix (Streaming), October 2015
  • DVD.com, September of 2015
  • DVD.com, December of 2014
  • Hulu, November of 2013

Another thing to watch for is completely free content, like:

But let’s say you’ve run through that list and you’re out of things to watch for free. As someone who doesn’t watch a whole lot, the service I really want is one where I can pay per movie, and not for a monthly or yearly plan. Like I said, I watch one or two movies in a month and don’t want to spend more than $20/year. Paying $3 per film on Amazon Video or YouTube seems a bit much, so what I really want is a service where I can pay just one dollar to watch a movie.

Enter VidAngel

Utah has a history of birthing innovative content solutions, presumably because they have a disproportionately high share of the “family values” market that wants “clean” versions of popular movies and television. Utah-based companies CleanFlicks, Play It Clean Video, ClearPlay, CleanFilms, and VidAngel were all created to sell edited versions of popular releases with sex, swearing, etc. removed. Some of these have been shut down after lawsuits from major motion picture corporations, others have played a pivotal role in the passing of new legislation regarding content distribution, and some legal battles are still ongoing. But putting aside both copyright lawsuits (a subject which I find fascinating) and content filtering (a subject I find delightful and endearing), I want to focus on the payment plan of VidAngel.

The way VidAngel works is that you pay $20 to buy (not rent!) a movie … but then you can sell it back to them for $19. (The oddities of copyright law are at the root of this strange distribution model.) Your next movie also costs $20, but since you have $19 in credit you only pay one dollar out-of-pocket. So basically what this means is that you pay $19 as an initial one-time membership cost, but then every subsequent movie you watch is only one dollar.

One dollar to stream a movie!? Perfect! Doing the math, two movies a month plus the upfront cost is $43/year–already cheaper than even the cheapest plans on Netflix and the like–and after two years the cost of two movies per month averages out to $33.50/year, to about $30/year at three years, and to under $30/year after four years. And even if you watch three times as many movies than I do, VidAngel is cheaper than Netflix even watching six movies each month! (By $4.88 after one year, or $14.38/year over a two year period, etc.)

So having run these numbers I said to them, “Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.” With my digital dollar metaphorically in hand, I started browsing the catalogue. The selection of television is minimal, but the movie selection is actually quite good (better than Amazon Prime or Hulu, and even includes noteworthy titles not on Netflix).

I figured I should try out their content filtering while I’m at it, since that’s their main jam. What to watch? Game of Thrones without violence? Wolf of Wall Street without profanity? Star Wars: Episode One without the 208 shots containing Jar-Jar Binks? (All real filter options, by the way.)

In the end I decided to finally watch Mulholland Drive, with 7 out of 138 available content filters removing sex and nudity. The content control is ridiculously fine-tuned. You can just click “nudity” to take it all off (har-har), or you can enter the drop-down menus to distinguish between full nudity vs. nudity obscured by a shower door, human nudity vs. nudity depicted in statues, etc.. (And by way of apology to David Lynch fans offended by the notion of editing his directorial vision: Think of this experiment as a meta-critical reflection on Lynch’s thesis, “No hay banda.”)

The streaming quality was comparable with other services. I was annoyed that a VidAngel commercial (about how to sell back the movie) began playing before the end of the credits, but after griping about that in a feedback survey a VidAngel customer service representative sent me an email just a few minutes later explaining that this video only plays after the first movie you watch on your account. I was not expecting any response to a generic feedback survey: color me impressed!

Now, having sold back the movie for $19 in credit, I can pay just one more dollar to watch any movie in their library, which I can then sell back for $19 to repeat the process ad infinitum. They also provided me a referral link by which I can earn free movies, so if you’re interested in either screening a family-safe version of your favorite film or just having a cheap pay-per-movie streaming service, check them out at this link:

https://www.vidangel.com?vip=umx07jm9

Happy streaming!

[Well, there you have it! The proof is in the pudding, or, the blog post, I guess. Do you have any questions for my anonymous friend about his streaming habits? Or would you like to hear about some of his other money-saving ideas? For example, I believe he told me last week that he spends less than $40 per year on his cell phone plan. If you’d like to hear about any of that, let us know in the comments!]

 

Photo Credit: Steinar La Engeland

I Sold My Hair on Ebay

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Do you ever look around your home, at all the varied things you own, and think “There’s just so much stuff here! I bet I could pare it down and that at least some of it would be worth some cash.”

Or maybe someone (like one of us crazy personal finance bloggers) said that you can pick up some extra cash unloading some of your unused junk on eBay. It’s a nice thought, right? Get rid of something you’re not using, pocket the cash.

Well, something along those lines happened to me. Sort of.

Warning: If the title of this post grossed you out, you’re probably not going to like the rest of what follows. Especially the fact that there are pictures. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Huh? What? You Sold WHAT on eBay?

My hair. See, what originally happened is that I decided to take my hair from long (three-quarters of the way down my back) to shortish (just below my ears) – and to donate, instead of discarding, the cut-off hair. I kept the sawed-off ponytail, with the intention of donating it to Locks of Love.

When I did a Google search to find out how to send my hair in, however, I found that there is some controversy out there regarding Locks of Love. Unable to pin down exactly the right place to donate my hair to (at that time), I started researching the alternative: selling it.

At first, I was a little discouraged. Though long enough to meet most requirements, my hair has what some websites designated as a “fatal flaw:” it’s curly. Straight hair is, according to many online guides to hair selling, the most sought-after and highly-priced type of hair.

But still, my hair met all of the other requirements for a good sale, namely:

  • Clean
  • Undyed
  • Long enough (10 inches or more)
  • Chemical free (in my case, completely free of harsh chemical use, since I practice no-shampoo washing)
  • Free of heat damage (I do not use hair dryers, curling irons, or straightening irons)
  • From a non-smoker who doesn’t take any drugs

So with my ponytail in hand, I logged on to make my first-ever eBay listing.

Actually Selling My Hair on eBay

First, I considered the fact that there are sites dedicated solely to the listing of hair for sale – sort of eBay or Craigslist specifically for hair. But these sites charge you money to list your hair, and since this isn’t likely to be something I do very often, I felt that the no-cost initial listing of eBay was the best bet.

I found this guide called “Selling Hair Facts” written and posted by Karen Shelton on a message board on HairBoutique.com. It’s quite comprehensive, and she won my heart by starting the post off with an explanation of my favorite O’Henry short story, “The Gift of the Magi.”

One of the things Karen Shelton’s post addressed was the risk of not getting paid for your hair, with some services. This is the reason I decided to use eBay and take only PayPal as payment, since PayPal offers some protection for sellers that you would not get by accepting a personal check or money order.

Another thing Shelton’s article pointed out was that hair with a “natural wave” in it might actually garner some real attention and cash, so I went for it.

I took several pictures of the ponytail of hair itself, next to a ruler (to demonstrate the length), one in indirect sunlight and one with the camera flash, to give a good idea of the color.

One thing that I also had was a picture (that didn’t show my face) of how the hair had looked on my head, immediately before I cut it. It was a coincidence that I even had the photo, but it worked out well – I think people buying hair want to see it in its natural environment.

With these pictures, I wrote up a detailed description of my hair, its length, its color, and all the attributes that I listed about (undyed, no chemicals, etc.) and put it up on eBay with the title “11″ Ponytail of Honey Blonde Curly/Wavy Human Hair” and an opening bid of just $0.99.

Why 99 cents? Because it was an experiment, first and foremost. More than making money off it, I wanted to see how high it might go. There were a few bids in the first few days – getting the price up into the teens. I was pretty pleased with that – it seemed like it was at least going to be worth my while to have listed it, considering the hair itself was something I “got for free.” That’s the nice thing about selling your hair – it’s almost 100% pure profit!

There were a few people who had put the listing on their “watch list,” and for the next few days, nothing happened. Then suddenly, as my listing neared its end, the bids began to shoot up dramatically (nothing out of the ordinary for an online auction!).

The winning bid when it closed was $166.50! From that, $5.13 went to PayPal fees, and $5.34 for shipping via eBay’s partnership with the US Postal Service. So for my trouble of keeping the ponytail, photographing it, listing it, and shipping it (maybe two hours of work, tops?), I got a cool $156.03.

Lessons Learned

All-in-all, I was pretty happy with the experience. The only downside was that a few people in my personal life were grossed out by the concept – my boyfriend/now-fiancé was especially not happy about having the disembodied ponytail in the apartment!

The “catch” is that I can really only grow my hair long enough for this every two years or so. It’s actually been almost two years since this particular incident happened (took me a while to write about it, obviously!), so I could do it again soon, if I wanted. But you have to really want to cut your hair and sell it for this to work. Since my wedding is coming up later this year, that’s not a position I’m in right now.

But who knows, maybe as soon as the wedding is done, I’ll chop my ponytail off once again and sell it to recoup some wedding costs!

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