With the prices going up day after day, do you feel like someone is always reaching into your wallet and taking the dollars systematically away from you? I am not a conspiracy theorist but something crazy has to be going on.
I feel like we are being pickpocketed. You have to take more and more money to the grocery store these days. The dollars are just slipping away. Every week it seems like these companies are raising prices, shrinking the amounts in their packages and even shorting us on the pounds and ounces that are in our meat packages and in our bagged produce. People have to weigh their purchases now to make sure that they are getting what they are paying for. I sometimes feel like I am at war but I am not sure with who. Is it the grocery store, the middleman, the rancher or the farmer, the state regulators or the elite globalists? I really do not believe it is the rancher or the farmer. They are being screwed too. Feed and ferilizer prices are astronomical! I am so glad that we paid for our yearly ferilization of the lawn last February for this whole year and got a 3% discount. The price went up year over year but only by $15. If you are paying on a monthly basis now, the price just keeps going up. I have talked about what we are doing: eating our stockpile that we have had for a couple of years purchased at lower prices, eating the proper portions of food, not wasting food, and only buying when things are on loss leader. I did pick up our two large packages of chicken breasts with our raincheck this week($2.19 a lb.) while I was out picking up prescriptions. I will elaborate on this topic in a future post.
But today, I want to concentrate on our electric and natural gas bill. We got our April 21 bill yesterday. I expected it would go down quite a bit because we have had some warmer days this past month. Just when you think spring is here, you get a couple of small snow storms and you realize winter hasn’t left yet. That being said, we are on the warmer side with a few cold ones mixed in. I will remind you that my last bill was $300.+. Yesterday’s bill was $ 296.77. So for the warmer days, we saved about $3.00. Our usage was just a smidgen more than last year yet the bill was $71.54 higher. Yes, I do know that the higher oil prices helped with that.
Hubby went and got the figures for our bills year over year. From April of 2024 to April of 2025, we spent $ 2,000. From April of 2025 to the current bill from April 2026, we have spent $3,000. That is a $1,000. increase. Our average kwh’s or electric and gas therms have remained about the same so the smart meters that were installed in our neighborhood has nothing to do with this.
When you question this, we are told that the AI centers that are being built and our stupid Governor Hochul and her green agenda is causing this. Perhaps that is the case. I do know that supply and demand does play a big factor. But a $1,000. increase for the same supply and demand is ridiculous over a year period. Our company that supplies our gas and electricity is in Spain. I would love to know how and why the Democrats allowed that to happen.
There isn’t much I can do about it except to vote for Bruce Blakeman in November and hope he wins. He says he will get rid of this nonsense. Anyone would be better than Hochul.
Politics aside, we have to do something to lower our bill more than $3.00 in a month’s period. So I am concentrating right now on what we can do for the spring and summer.
We will be cooking as much as we can on our outside grill. We have a full tank of propane that we got for $ 4.+ last year. I don’t think their weight scales were accurate. The guy insisted they were right, so I got a bargain.
If and when we use the stovetop, we will fit the pan to the burner and cover them. We will use our crockpot and instant pot if they are needed outdoors or in the garage.
We will also be eating a lot of salads and other cold dishes.
I will be doing a bunch of baking using the full oven so that I can stock the freezer with those goods for the seasons ahead while it is still colder here. We have a couple of cold days ahead. Then the oven will not be used until October.
We still have our heat on because the nights are cold but we should be able to turn that off in May.
We will only use the A/C if the humidity is high. Otherwise, it will remain off. We can open windows and/or use our ceiling fans. We grew up without A/C and we can do it again.
We will be having the A/C checked by the company we use so that if we do need it, it will be in perfect operating order. Hubby has found a coupon that we can use so we will only pay $79. for this. There is another company putting a coupon out there to get it done for $39. However, we have heard they always find something wrong that they can charge you for which will be more than the difference in the coupons. So no thank you to that. We have used our people for years and they have never screwed us.
We already use cold water to wash our clothes and will continue that. My detergent plus a scoop of oxiclean gets all stains out. We will hang as many clothes as we can. We have a drying rack and we use shower rods to hang shirts, etc. Dryer usage will be minimal.
I continue to take navy showers and use the warm up water to either flush a toilet or water some outside flowers.
I have written about other ways we can save on electricity and natural gas in prior posts.
If I have misspelled anything or made any mistakes, please excuse me. Eloise got me up at 3AM again and I am really tired. I only got 3 hours and 16 minutes of sleep. When Hubby gets up, I will be going back to bed.
If you guys can give me and everyone else some tips on how to save on these things, please comment so that we can save as much as we can. We can all help each other in this community.