How to Save Money with Netflix

Do you or someone in your extended family have a Netflix account?  Then you may have considered the idea of sharing accounts to reduce the cost of the monthly subscription fees.

Well, guess what? It's okay!! Netflix has publicly said that they don't care if their customers share accounts. They prefer that you create separate IDs for each user to see preferences of different viewers.

In case you don't know, one email and password will lead you to an account screen where you then have to choose the user. You can have up to five.

A few years back, Netflix had a huge marketing faux pas where they split their mailing service...you know where they mail you the DVD, from their streaming service. The two services where both included with the monthly fee. Then they separated the two services and you had to decide whether you wanted one or the other.

Finally it split off the mailing service to another company and changed the name of that service to Qwickster. They also raised the monthly fee of streaming.

With all these changes, people have yelled and screamed but the initial split of the two services really hurt the company's stock price. There is also a lot of competition out there for watching movies, especially streaming.

Perhaps in an effort to stand out from the competition and to quiet complaints for all the other changes and price increases it allows for the account sharing.

Whatever the reason, if you can take advantage of it, why not? Let your kids away at college use it in their dorm.  Create an ID for your mom who is on social security. Make an agreement with your sister to split the cost and have one account. Netflix is ok with it.

Here are a few other ways that you can save money with Netflix:

Pause your account when going on vacation.

If you are going away for a few weeks or months and you won't be using your account, you can temporarily suspend service or pause your account to avoid the fee for that month.

Buy a discounted Netflix gift card

Target and other stores often sell gift cards for Netflix memberships at around 5% off. This is a great deal especially if you start stacking your coupons and offers like I always do. For instance, buy the gift card with a credit card that gives you cash back. Or look for a Groupon special that includes coupons off of your entire purchase. The gift cards usually show up around Christmas time so that you can give a one year membership as a gift. But who says that you can't give that gift to yourself?

Skip the premium service

If you aren't going to share your account or if you don't care about having HD quality then you can get a basic service for $8 per month. Netflix has three tiers of service; Basic, Standard and Premium. The current price for these tiers are as follows:

Basic - $8

Standard - $10

Premium - $12

When I first married my husband, I had everything in my house set to standard because I didn't want to pay extra for HD quality even though I had an HD television. He, of course, was having none of that, and immediately upgraded all our services to HD. LOL.  The things you do for love. So I decided that I would have to find other ways to save and started couponing.

How to Save Money with NetFlix