Mom’s cable company charged $141 monthly for one of those awful “triple play” packages. You know the sort - internet, TV, and home phone for the same price as a bottle of Blanton’s every month.

She chopped that down to $50 monthly with a few hours of research and some gear from Walmart and Amazon. One-time costs totaled $115.

We did this by…

• Moving home phone to MagicJack
• Ditching cable TV for an Onn Watch streaming stick
• Rightsizing and contracting her internet plan

Cable home phone ➛ MagicJack

At the risk of sounding like an ad, MagicJack is much easier and better than I thought. For $50 a year, you get full home telephone services over VoIP¹. Consumers don’t have to know what that means - it’s nearly plug-and-play. Plug the device into your modem and phone, follow a set-up page, and you have working home phone in two minutes.

It has all the features you’d expect like voicemail and caller ID; and a few you probably wouldn’t expect like voicemail-to-email, answer-on-app, and a cool conferencing feature. We also ported her number - a totally passive process that takes a few days and another one time $20 fee.

MagicJack is $50 (which includes the first year of service) online or at Walmart and entirely displaces a home phone plan, along with the monthly phone modem rental².

Cable TV ➛ Onn Watch streaming stick

Mom isn’t huge on TV, so this was an easy change. All she wants is local news and EWTN, which are both available with any streaming stick. We decided to roll the dice with the cheapest streaming stick we could find (Walmart’s Onn Watch), and it works great! It’s not the speediest thing, but it does everything that any Android TV can do³.

Mom’s TV’s only accepts coax input, so we chained an HDMI to RCA converter (that is, HDMI input to RCA composite output) and a RF modulator (RCA to RF coax). This video shows our approach, and this video shows alternatives for other older TVs.

Onn Watch is $15 at Walmart and displaced her TV plan, along with the two monthly cable box rentals.

Internet rightsizing + contract

The cable company had Mom on a 300 mbps plan. This is, to put it gently, overkill. She doesn’t have a 4K TV, only has a handful of devices, and her streaming intensity tops out with one device at a time. So she bumped down to the slowest available tier (150 mbps) and hasn’t noticed a difference.

Only one internet company serves Mom’s neighborhood but you should consider all fiber and 5G providers if you have the option. Luckily, her provider does offer a 20% discount for a 12 month contract. Since she doesn’t have access to competing providers anyway, the contract is a no-brainer.

You could save more long term by buying your own modem instead of renting the cable company’s modem, but we decided to keep the rental for smoother support.

Comparing costs

The $115 one-time costs paid for themselves on the second month. Here’s a quick before/after:

BEFORE

AFTER

BONUS! Newspaper savings

Since I’m $9 short of the $1,100 promised in the title, here’s a bonus. Mom also switched from the daily paper to weekend paper with daily online access. This saved another $120/yr, dropping from $25 to $15 each month. With the cable savings, that’s $1,211.04 each year.