by Simon 23 Replies latest jw friends
Gotta admit that we have saved a lot of money this year -- no traveling -- not much eating out -- etc
Our Amazon spending is up and I think our booze budget is just totally trounced. I think I'm making the trip to the liquor store for our monthly supply about twice a week now.
Honestly, we did decide to pay our mortgage off early with the cash we accumulated. Now debt free and ready for the economic collapse ahead.
@Italiancalipso: You can just put the entire infrastructure on a timer if you're looking to save some money. It really makes no measurable difference to switch off the antenna, pulling up the webpage to do it costs more energy than the antenna does in an entire day. In most cases it doesn't actually switch it off either, it just blocks the traffic.
The best thing to do is turn down your heat/air. I have 3 settings: day (6a-9p) 68/72F, evening (9p-1am) 64/75F and night (1am-6a) 60/80F. I turn down the night because nobody notices when they sleep, but you don't want to go out to the bathroom in 60F either, so until everyone is settled, I keep it at 65. Also reset the heat to 68F every 4 hours. If we need to boost the heat for whatever reason, we don't need to keep it that high for the rest of the day. I also have a geofence on my smartphone so if we leave the house, it turns it down to 60F and when we get within a mile, it will set it back.
The other things to do is actually invest money into insulation and the like. I saved 50-75% on my heating bill between $1500 of attic insulation and $200 for a smart thermostat. That's almost $50-75/month I'm saving (now I pay less than $100/month for gas and electric, living near Canada in the Northeast)
Our house is entirely electric, no gas or oil, so the electric bill can get expensive.
We learned that one of the biggest electric hogs in the house was the water heater. So, we put it on a timer. We only have it on in the evenings from 5 to 11. That's the time of heaviest water usage with cooking, laundry, showers all happening during that time.
And believe it or not, it keeps the water in the tank hot from 11pm until 5pm the next day. So it's only on for a quarter of the day. It still gives you enough hot water for one load of laundry or a shower without depleting the supply.
If I'm home doing lots of laundry and running the dishwasher at an earlier time, I just manually override it and turn it on.
Also, we set the temperature down at 120°F. It will still give you a hot enough shower, but it's below the threshold for scalding burns. Important when you have small children.
