God wants you to lower your electric bill

One of the biggest factors of your utility bills is your heating, cooling, and lighting. Surprisingly however, many people don't use what mother nature already gave us - the sun and wind. I notice that whenever I am at someone else's home, they more often than not have the blinds shut tight and all the lights on in the house, in the middle of the day.

At our house we have a pretty good system of heating, lighting, and cooling. During the summer months we adjust our blinds and open windows to keep the heat out, let the breeze come through, and light up the house. During the day we rarely have a light bulb on because all our blinds are open.

To keep the heat out, we shut all the blinds during the day when we are not home to create a dark, cool house. When we get home we fully open all the blinds on the side of the house that the sun is not striking. On the sunny side, we crack them upwards so that light gets in but does not shine on any walls, furniture, or floor (if anything it shines on the ceiling, which of course also helps lighten the room.

We also select windows to open based on the direction of the wind to maximize the breeze coming through the house. If it's cool enough outside, we just open all of them.

The savings on your electric bills are substantial, and as a bonus you get to sit down to breakfast and say things like, "the angle of the sun sure is giving us lots of light this morning."

Followup to unexpected medical bills

On September 7 I revealed a few medical bills that were put on our credit card. We had some hard decisions to make, and my wife and I had different strategies for tackling this new debt.

Obviously we were not going to carry a credit card balance, it had to be paid off. This left us with 3 options: tighten our belts and attack it as best we could, use a portion of our emergency fund and then repay ourselves back slowly, or use a portion of our debt repayment to pay it out. Her idea was to use the debt repayment (as that is what it is technically for) and I wanted to use the emergency fund, seeing this as an emergency.

Our compromise was to pay as much as we could during the month and see what was left over at the end, then use the debt repayment amount to pay it. Here we are at ground zero and it stands as thus: out of the $1,700 card balance we have paid off all but $400 just by saving a little extra and putting whatever we can into it (and some generous help). It's been tight. But now out of our debt repayment (what we pay extra towards the principles of our debt) we need only use $400, still allowing us to put $900 towards other debt. In the end, I think we both feel pretty good about this result.

Are you prepared for a power outage?

A small hurricane slammed into Louisiana last night, because Louisiana hasn't had enough of them yet. Over 75,000 homes went dark. As I live to the west of Louisiana, we were also watching this little storm tumble its way through the Gulf of Mexico. A popular financial blogger, AllFinancialMatters, was right in the middle of it.

So what, if any, provisions do you keep should you have an extended power outage? When flooding occurs, there is also the possibility of contaminated water. The basic supplies that we keep on hand at all times include:

• A battery powered flashlight
  
• Candles, matches
  
• Oil burning lamps and a few containers of oil
  
• Small bottles of water (we have about 15 in our fridge that we always refill - we like to drink water)
  
• Gallon jugs of water in the garage, we have a few of those
  
• Canned foods

These are the supplies we always have. They would tide us over for a few days if we are stuck without water/electricity. This is all we keep on hand, unless there is a major hurricane definitely heading our way. Frankly, I prefer not to subscribe to the "rush to the store and buy a ton of supplies" at the last minute kind of planning.