The Dreaded Power Bill

There is no better way to ruin a weekend than to see your power company's e-bill sitting in your inbox first thing Saturday morning.  I woke up Saturday to a $300 power bill.

This is my first winter in a house (well, in a house I've been responsible for paying the bills on).  Apartment dwelling has its benefits, especially in the utilities department.  Not only was our townhouse significantly smaller than the house, but it also shared walls on both sides, which makes for awesome insulation.

I clearly didn't totally take these factors into consideration when planning my budget.  We went from a much smaller townhouse with gas heating to an all electric house.  Obviously I expected the power bill to go up a bit, but not in my wildest dreams did I imagine we would hit the 300-mark.  Needless to say, I spent the weekend in a panic, trying to re-budget for the month in order to come up with payment for this.

January has been a crap month for budgeting.  It's the first time since the summer that we've been sticking to it, and unexpected expenses seem to be coming out of the woodwork.  Dues for various community organizations are due, the new experience of Homeowners Association is upon us, the repercussions of spending too much on Christmas hit, AND apparently the power bill also goes through the roof.  So it's taken a lot of reorganization.  Here are a couple of immediate steps I took:

1.  Live off the pantry.  I buy a lot of food.  A lot.  We have a fairly full pantry and freezer.  This normally doesn't mean much because we have a few basics that we always eat, and the rest gets neglected.  So as of Saturday we are officially not buying groceries until we have eaten through what we have.  Now of course we're already hitting that time when we have run out of some essentials (like canola oil) that will have to be bought in order to cook the food we have.  But I am limiting the purchases to those type of things.
2.  Turn off the space heater.  I am naturally cold.  I sleep with the space heater on, and turn it on at various times throughout the day.  Since Saturday I have learned to layer clothing and carry around a quilt.
3.  This one I don't necessarily recommend for others, but in a moment of desperation I borrowed from the nest egg.  According to Dave Ramsey, there are certain steps one should take in order to eliminate debt and live a financially secure life.  He recommends an emergency $1000 savings account which was discussed earlier, then devoting all your extra cash to paying off consumer debt, then setting up a larger emergency fund that should have 3-6 months worth of living expenses.  I call this emergency fund our nest egg, just to clarify between it and our $1000 savings account (which, also as discussed before, isn't quite up to par right now).  We put this money aside before paying off consumer debt because we are a one-income household and my husband works in a somewhat insecure industry (who doesn't these days?).  Just for our sanity, we wanted to have a few thousand set aside "just in case."  This money is in a money market account that is not used at all except to hold this money and gather a tiny bit of interest.  Well, I used that interest to pay the homeowners association today.  Not sure if that was the best idea, but at least it's paid.

Now my big question becomes: how do we lower our power bill?  Beyond the space heater thing, I don't really know where to conserve energy.  I fear the thermostat needs to be lowered a couple of degrees, but I haven't been able to bring myself to do that yet.  My power company has a list of helpful hints here, but I didn't find them overly helpful.  Except the one about the convection oven.  Apparently they use a lot less energy than a regular oven.  Though I don't think I can really justify that cost quite yet.  So over the next few days I will be attempting to compile my own list of energy saving techniques to share with you, and hopefully I'll learn a thing or two myself.  Until then....