Lower my energy bill

By Brad Beckstrom

Photo credit: morguefile.com

My nephew wants to live lean. He’s twenty-something and still in college. He’s moving to a new town and asked me for advice. First, I’ll tell him be careful what you ask for, you’ll often get it.

So, here goes. My advice, not in any particular order.

Get some roommates.

New in town? Get a roommate. If you’re in college, I recommend you avoid expensive campus housing and meal plans and opt for a near campus rental. When I was in college and working my first job, I opted for two roommates. While this is often not ideal, it allows you to rent a small townhouse or slightly larger apartment and save money at the same time.

With three people chipping in for the bills, everything becomes a bit more affordable. If you’re lucky, you may meet some friends for life, as I did on several occasions. Good roommates are sometimes hard to find but it’s easier now to explore options with Craigslist and social media. I found the best roommates are often someone I’ve already met, possibly someone I worked with at a restaurant, or met at school.

At first, avoid year long leases, if you can. Try to find an existing two roommate set up that’s looking for a third. This way if things don’t work out on your first try you’re not locked into any long-term situation.

I stuck with the roommate set up for years, even after I started my own company and had purchased other homes. I kept the first home as a rental, replacing myself with another roommate when I moved on. I had a roommate until I got married.

Roommates can be a pain, so you have to really work at it until you find a great setup. Once you find it, volunteer to help out with the bills and track things using Mint.com or apps like Splitwise. A simple shared Google docs spreadsheet is great if you have multiple folks adding items to the document.

Work in High School and College.

My grades were just below a 3.0 at a midsize state college, but I was offered the first three corporate jobs I interviewed for. I was hired and put to work for a boss who was Princeton grad, and coworkers who went to Dartmouth, Duke, and Notre Dame. My point of difference was not the name of my university or my GPA, it was my work experience in college and high school. Interviewers were impressed with my proven work ethic. Very few of those Ivy League types had worked two jobs in college and started a travel business. [Read more…] about Your Money or Your Life. The Frug’s Advice for College Students and Recent Grads.

I’ve been using a great service to track our family’s energy use over the past few years, myenergy.com . The service recently got a makeover and is now a Nest Company. Nest makes those high-tech energy saver thermostats. As you can see, The Frug is not so frugal when it comes to energy usage. Looks like our family of four is spending double what the average energy user in the area is spending. You can track by total bill, or in the case of electricity, actual kilowatt hours. You can also track and compare with your neighbors or with friends anywhere in the country. Either way, we are off the chart. I still get quite a few complaints that the house is not cool enough. The source of the complaints is a two level heating and cooling system linked to timed zone thermostats downstairs and upstairs. I have them set up to cut off the air conditioning downstairs when no one is around and vice versa, upstairs. I need to reprogram them every time daylight savings rolls around and even need to get the system rebalanced occasionally! All of this to spend more money than my neighbors!

I think many people including myself focus on the heating and air-conditioning, but don’t realize how much energy appliances and electronics consume. A few years ago I read that cable boxes use more energy than an average size refrigerator even when the TV is off. We’ve gotten rid of all of our cable boxes, soon to be followed by the cable company. More on that later.

I’d be interested to hear what other folks spend on their electric or gas bills. I must say that we’ve done much better on the gas/heating bill over the past few years. I’m going to be sharing other family of four stats on this blog. A lot of the economic reports include great detail on family of four spending. I will be trying to get to the bottom of why our family of four spending often bears no resemblance to the stats. For example, I am continually blown away by the amount of water we use for a family that doesn’t water the lawn or have a pool. Is our water meter rigged? Do our toilets run all night? (They don’t. I did the food dye test) There are also the families that spend way below the averages, this is where we want to be. Mr. Money Mustache publishes his family’s entire budget. He was recently featured in the Washington Post. People around here have really had a hard time getting their heads around how he pulls this off. It’s good reading.

Example of some of the charts on myenergy.com. As an added incentive the service is free and you also get points for lowering your energy bill.