Move over Jeff Bezos, there’s a new sheriff in town! I have the boots, plaid, and budget to prove it. You don’t need Amazon Prime. Here’s why. I share the dirty little secret about Amazon Prime and why don’t need it in your life.

Cutting the Cord

My husband hasn’t had cable since he left home for college. I hadn’t heard of Netflix until I met him. I joke that my retirement planning in high school was funded by Blockbuster’s used movies and TV series sales. I had a DVD player in my dorm room and enough seasons of Supernatural to get me through finals week.

Netflix used to be the only player in the streaming game “back in my day”. Now, there are so many different options I get crippling anxiety trying to rattle them all off. We’ve had Netflix and Amazon Prime and HBO and Hulu. Don’t forget Disney+ and Discovery+ and Peacock. We had Curiosity stream for a year. It was a lot to juggle and track.

Cable is expense. We all know that. And no one loves watching commercials. So cutting the cord was easy. But now, streaming has made it possible to spend as much on different subscriptions to equal cable. It’s out of control.

The Breaking Point

Last March, we got the alert that our Amazon Prime subscription was up for renewal. I was already peeved because Amazon recently made huge cutbacks on their Prime Music in order to get users to spend even more money on their Unlimited Music add-on subscription. No thank you! I also started noticing that a lot of Prime shipping items were starting to take one to two days to ship before the two day shipping kicked in, which meant it was taking four days to get orders I was paying extra every month to get two-day shipping on.

On top of the recent headaches and Amazon’s elimination of the free month of Prime for late deliveries, Amazon alerted us they were raising the pricing $20 a year. Between Netflix and Amazon, we were paying almost $30/month and spending more time on YouTube watching free content like Geography Now and Smarter Every Day than streaming content on our paid services. Enough was enough.

We decided to cancel our Amazon Prime renewal. (Pro tip: always turn off the auto renewals as soon as you sign up for annual subscriptions so you have a chance to review your subscriptions before they charge for another full year. This works for free trails as well.) We have HBO Max free through a utilities provider, and it has more than enough to stream (especially now that they merged Discovery Plus with it – momma needs her My Lottery Dream Home fix!) combined with our personal collection and the public library. While $30 might not seem like a lot, it adds up month after month. If we’re only watching a few things a month, it’s cheaper to rent them than stream.

But the Free Shipping!

Dirty little secret: you don’t need Prime for free shipping! All orders over $35 that qualify for Prime shipping are still free without Prime. You might not get them in two days, but we weren’t always getting them in two days anyway. And the majority of the time, our orders ship sooner than expected and arrive a few days after ordering. I’m not wealthy enough that I can pay all that extra dough to get my dog’s poop bags a day earlier. We leave items in the cart until we have enough for a minimum order, then ship the batch.

If you don’t have the self control not to overbuy just to hit free shipping minimums, than you might need to cut Amazon completely from your life, at least for a season. I promise you, you will survive, And your budget and net worth will thank you.

But What If I Need It Fast?

If you need it fast, don’t order it from Amazon! When there’s something we needed the same or next day, we never ordered it from Amazon anyway. We went to the local store and picked it up.

Amazon has become such a household staple and for good reason – they made it super easy for you to spend your money quick. But that often benefits them more than it does you. You don’t need Amazon in your life, especially when you’re trying to get out of debt.

Bonus Easter Egg

I found out after cancelling Amazon Prime that Prime music wasn’t even a thing anymore! I was still able to get the exact same music on the exact same shuffle without Prime as I could with it. And both suck compared to free Spotify which lets me listen to entire albums if I’m patient enough to listen to ads. Which for $20+ a month, let me know you, I’ve learned patience (and how to transfer my music from my CDs to my phone.)

So how about you? Have you sat down and looked at how much you spent on Amazon in the last year? Did it blow your mind? Have you broken up with your Amazon Prime yet? Do you have any regrets or do you wish you had sooner? We may go back for a month when we’re finally ready to binge the last few seasons of The Expanse we haven’t watched yet, but we honestly have so much on our watchlist it’s probably at least a year down the road.