I'm with Pete C. on this one.

You can save 75% of the cost of maintaining your home by learning to do the simple repetative stuff yourself. Cutting down a tree falls into the other 25% catagory.

I'd either rent a cherry picker to do this or hire any company in the sign business because all of them will have cherry pickers. That way, you can do the job safely and not risk dropping the tree onto something you don't want to crush.

Either that, or hire a tree service company to cut it down for you.

I'm just thinking that at some point DIY becomes dangerous when you're doing things you don't know how to and the consequences of doing them wrong can be significant. This is one of those instances, and it's where a wise DIY'er would pay the extra money to rent a lift so that he can do the job safely or pay someone experienced in this kind of work to do it for him.