If you’re like my family and are renting movies almost every week, you’ll be interested in checking out Netflix.  Even if you only rent them a couple of times a month, read on because I’ve found a new option that could  save you a bunch of money.

My boys love renting movies, especially in the summer so they can bring them to our lake cabin to watch at night.  The problem with that is that one of the places that we rent movies from, has a one night rental policy for new releases so when I check out the movie on a Friday, I’m paying a late fee when I return it on Sunday.  Then there’s the problem of not remembering to return the movies when they’re supposed to be returned and you can imagine the late fees that I’ve been paying when renting a minimum of 2-3 movies a time.

I remember when the Redboxes started popping up throughout the Fargo Moorhead area.  For those of you who don’t know what a Redbox is, it’s a kiosk located strategically around town, where you can rent a movie for $1 a day/night.  I was so excited when this first showed up at Hornbachers because I could now rent a movie for $1 a day.  I had plans of watching the movie and running it back to the Redbox…..all for $1.  The problem with that of course was that if I didn’t get to watch the movie the first night, I had to keep it another night and my cost for the movie now doubled.   Again, as hard as it to believe, I couldn’t always get the movie back even after I finished watching it and those late fees were racking up.  As much as I liked Redbox, I was burned one time and because the movie was “lost” in my house, unbeknownst to me, I ended up renting it for 25 days and their policy is that at that point, you buy the movie.  Yep, that’s right…..I ended up paying $25 for a movie that I would have never bought but because I forgot to return it and didn’t realize it, it was now mine.  With Redbox, there isn’t a sales clerk to call you and remind you that your movie is overdue so be sure this doesn’t happen to you.

So, all of this brings me to my latest find!  Netflix is a service that you sign up for on the internet and the best part is that you can actually try the service for FREE for the two weeks.  As long as you cancel before 14 days have passed, you owe nothing but I have a feeling if you’ve ever found yourself in my predicament, you may be interested in using this service indefinitely.  There are a couple of different options that you sign up for; the one I chose will cost me $8.99 a month and will allow me unlimited access to hundreds of movies and tv series.  I’ll be able to watch them on my pc, through my son’s XBox and through my other son’s Wii.  If you have a television that has wireless capabilities, you’ll be able to watch on there too.

Check out the website and see if this is something that you might be interested in.  I know that I’ll be saving myself money even if a month went by and we didn’t rent a movie, which never happens so I should be ahead of the game for once!