So here we are, one year later. As promised, here is the energy use data for the last twelve months.

Obviously the big question is how this compares to last year’s data. Crunch the numbers yourself if you’re so inclined. I’m simply going to put the average daily use side by side.

On average, we used less energy after the house was insulated. More to the point, if we total up all the kilowatt hours for the respective years, we find we used 23,390 before the insulation and 16,544 after. That’s a drop of almost 7,000 kWh. Even accounting for the freakish cold snap of January 2009, it’s a substantial reduction.

Or so it seems. How much does a kilowatt hour of electricity really cost? It’s complicated. Our bill shows energy charges and fuel charges and lots of stuff I can’t quite figure. I appreciate that Entergy has some tools for analyzing your bill, but I don’t understand why they don’t retain data longer than one year. I do know that our November 2011 bill is $22.97 (31%) lower than our November 2010 bill. I assume our savings more than offset the $2000 we spent on insulation.

Caveats: I talked about energy consumption but this is actually only electrical usage. We have some gas appliances, most notably our upstairs furnace. However, the downstairs furnace and of course the air conditioning system runs on electricity.

• We did not run out of money at the end of February. Granted, it’s a short month, but I think our austerity measures are paying off.
• I did our taxes yesterday, and despite my fears we are indeed getting a substantial refund.
• My online tax prep service (TurboTax) turned me onto Mint.com. I’d Iooked at Mint before but for some reason it never clicked. Now I see the appeal, and perhaps it will be helpful in the long term. In the short term it’s already yielded confirmation that we’ve reduced our grocery bill. It’s much easier than tabulating manually, and with nifty graphics too boot.

On the subject of our household finances, a consensus has emerged both in the comments of my recent post and elsewhere: Our grocery bill is out of whack, off the chain, out of control.

I agree. I’m not sure why I didn’t notice it myself earlier. In part, it might be an example of not seeing the tree for the forest. But mostly I attribute it to my general financial stupidity. I can think about numbers all day long, but put a dollar sign in front and I start getting sleepy.

In any case, I’m thankful to all those who brought this to my attention.

I’d reported spending over a grand on groceries over the last thirty days. That seemed a bit anomalous to me, but a weekly tab of $150-200 is not unusual. (Still high, I know. I’m getting to that, so bear with me.) If I had to guess I’d peg our monthly grocery expenses around $800.

But why guess? I checked my bank records and tabulated the numbers for the last six months.

August: $710.68
September: 617.94
October: $911.27
November: $976.98
December: $538.53
January: $1008.06

December was low because we spent a full week away from home, mostly living on my in-laws dime. January is actually under-reported, believe it or not, as I’m pretty sure I unloaded $100 worth of gift cards at the grocery.

The total comes to $4,763.46 for half a year. That averages to $793.91 per month, so it seems my above-cited guess was quite accurate.

I understand the average American household spends 9% on groceries. We are way over that. So, what’s going on? How is it possible that we spend so much on food? Do we have extravagant tastes? I don’t think so. We don’t buy a great deal of convenience foods or expensive meats or big ticket items. Occasionally I have splurged on booze, but I don’t think that accounts for the high receipts in this case. For the most part I don’t buy liquor at the grocery.

I’m tempted to blame the grocery. As a rule we shop at the nearest supermarket, which is the Rouse’s on Carrollton in Mid-City. (The totals above are exclusively from Rouse’s except for one visit to Dorginac’s in October and one visit to Winn-Dixie and another to Dorginac’s in November.) I’ve always felt good about shopping there because they are a regionally-based chain, and I’m generally happy with the quality and selection. But Xy’s often said their prices run high compared to other stores.

So, last Friday, Xy stopped at a Save a Lot on the West Bank of Jefferson Parish. She spent $81.82 and I was knocked out by the sheer quantity of groceries she brought home. It looked like 50% more than we’d bring home from a big trip to Rouse’s — at half the price.

We realized there were some key items she missed, so on Sunday we made a joint venture to a Save a Center here in Orleans Parish. That ran us $67.76, but we are now pretty well stocked for the next couple of weeks. I anticipate we’ll only need to get a few perishables over the coming weekend. If I’m right about this, we might expect to spend less than $400 per month on groceries just by changing the store where we buy most of our stuff. Obviously that would be a significant reduction, cutting our monthly grocery expense in half.

Maybe I’m wrong to blame Rouse’s. Maybe our shopping habits are really to blame. If so, shopping at Save a Lot would appear to effectively constrain our behavior. That could solve our budgetary problems in one fell swoop, and we might even learn something in the process.

Unfortunately it seems this is a timely issue. Rising food prices fueled the unrest in Egypt, and that will be hitting home soon. American food prices are expected to rise as much as 29% this year. I hope that doesn’t erase the savings outlined above. I think we’ll be staying active with our community garden.

While politicians in DC wrangle with cutting the federal budget, I’m trying to do the same thing here at home. It ain’t easy. I suggested to Xy we might cancel our newspaper subscription — she was not happy about that. Well, neither am I, exactly. But a part of me relishes the challenge.

First a glimmer of good news. Because of some sort of federal social security rollback, my monthly take-home pay just increased by $72.33. I guess Xy’s should have increased as well, but it’s actually gone down $1.50. Not sure why. But it’s still a net gain of $70.83.

Also, we were overpaying by $100.00 per month on our car loan. This was an intentional decision on my part, in order to pay it down more quickly. Same with our house note. But in the interests of cash flow, we can just pay the minimum on both of these. Of course, our monthly home escrow payment is going up by approximately $250.00, which is what precipitated this sense of impending doom in the first place.

So let’s do away with those two overpayments, combine the $70 take-home boost, and just effectively cancel out the escrow increase.

Awesome. I feel better already.

It’s smoke and mirrors, of course. Remember we were already having trouble making it to the end of each month. We do need to tighten the belt.

Here’s some things we can’t cut.

Cable television: Don’t have it, can’t cut it.
Home phone: Don’t have one, can’t cut it. (But see below.)
Second car: Don’t have one, can’t sell it.
Theater: Haven’t really gone since our daughter was born.

Here’s a breakdown of things we could cut completely.

Books: I’d estimate my monthly book club habit costs me around $12.00 on average. Sometimes we read cheap paperbacks, sometimes expensive hardcovers, and there’s quite a range between. I should be able to borrow most of these books from the library. I work above a library, after all, and there’s always interlibrary loan. I just submitted my first request, for Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson. As much as I like to support my local bookseller, I need that $19.99 this month.

Netflix: $14.99. Easy to cut.

Times-Picayune: $18.95. Vociferous objection from Xy duly noted.

Garden: Our community garden membership is $20.00 per month. Xy does a little work each month, and we get a basket of veggies and fresh eggs delivered on our door once or sometimes twice a month. I love that we’re getting locally grown organic food. I love the entrepreneurship of the guy who started the gardens. I love the educational aspect for our daughter. I really hate cutting this, because I think the food baskets are worth almost $20 in and of themselves, but perhaps not quite.

Yard: I’ve been paying a guy $35.00 to cut our lawn. Sometimes that adds up to $70.00 a month in the summertime when the grass goes twice as fast. It’s not that I’m lazy — really — but we don’t have a mower, and we don’t even have a good place to store a mower. I’m pretty sure a certain friend and neighbor will let me borrow his. I’ll be sure to bring it back right away. Promise. Also, our yard needs a little more attention, plus the exercise will be good for me.

Yoga: $15.00 per lesson at four per month = $60.00. A shame to cut this, but OK.

How much have we saved so far? I make it about $160.94.

So much for that. Now here’s some opportunities for saving rather than cutting:

Internet: Looks like we can save $13.00 if we switch from Cox Preferred to Cox Essential. That would drop us to a max download speed of 12 Mbps to 3 Mbps. But so what? I’m pretty sure we don’t get 12 Mbps during peak hours anyhow.

Grocery: Just as a baseline, we spent approximately $1,032.69 on groceries over the past month. Xy estimates that by hitting the Sav-A-Lot weekly we could save $80-120 per month on food costs. Let’s aim for a nice round $100.00.

Our total in now $273.94 per month. Hooray, this is starting to add up. That, more or less, may be what we need to make up the gap we have at the end of some months.

I was going to say that we don’t go out to eat much, if at all, but I note we’ve spent $116 or so at restaurants over the past month. One night the Sewerage & Water Board shut off water to our house as they fixed a blown main and so we went out and ended up spending $60 that we didn’t have. So that kind of thing has to be reined in.

Here are some costs that don’t appear negotiable, at least not immediately:

Energy: Hard to say, because it fluctuates, and we just added insulation under the house a few months ago. When we had our bill leveled it came out to $188/month. We keep our thermostat at a reasonable level, in my opinion, so I don’t see this one changing. Entergy solicited me to try SmartView yesterday, which is a no-cost pilot program to help people understand (and possibly reduce) their electricity usage — but we earn way too much to qualify.

Daycare: $690.00. I’ve realized our primary challenge is to get through the next four months. Then our daughter will be out of that daycare forever. We’ll get a bit of relief over the summer, and then the girl will begin Pre-K 3 at Xy’s school. It’s not free, alas, though it should be a bit cheaper than daycare. After a year of that, we hope to enroll her in a Pre-K program at a public school. That’s the plan, anyhow. If that works, our financial situation should improve in 16 months from now.

Cell phones: We pay Verizon $141.92 each month for our two phone plans. I have an unlimited web plan for my Blackberry, which Xy says she likes. A friend of mine suggested we could use an iTouch with Skype and save money, but I’m not convinced that would suit our needs. I’m pretty sure Xy would insist on being able to make an emergency call from the road. Perhaps we could tweak the plans we do have, but I find this awfully confusing. I think we’re locked in these plans until July or maybe May of next year. Maybe I need to call customer service.

Insurance: A friend recommended we get our insurance thru USAA, but since we’re not veterans this would require getting my father or father-in-law to buy some insurance. We could buy the smallest possible plan, say supplemental auto insurance for them, which might be worth it in the long run. Suffice it to say it’s a little complicated but bears further investigation.

I remain open to suggestions from all my friends and family. There is power in collective wisdom.

We were just getting serious about looking for ways to save on our monthly budget, and then this bomb dropped: Yesterday morning I opened some mail and learned that our mortgage payment will be going up. Substantially. Insurance has gone up, and so have taxes, because our home assessment more than doubled. That’s a bummer, but I don’t see any error there; it seems the house was radically under-assessed last year. It sucks that the bank didn’t anticipate this correctly at the time of purchase, but that’s water under the bridge now. I talked it over with our Realtor and she confirmed that we don’t really have any options. We can mitigate a bit by making a lump payment now, which we’ll do, but the increase in our monthly payment will still be substantial. It’s going to make the monthly budget a lot tougher.

In recent years we’ve counted on a big tax refund, but with our reduced income we rethought our withholding, and so I don’t think we’ll be getting money back from Uncle Sam. We might even owe more. Shudder. Sure is a good thing Obama extended the Bush tax cuts for the middle class. Oops, I said something political. That will surely distract anyone who reads this from my actual point. Why react to my petty personal problems when you can pontificate on massive federal issues?

I have to confess that we haven’t really done any of the belt-tightening I mentioned last June. I wish there was some obvious substantial luxury expense we could forgo. Perhaps we can do enough small things to make a difference.

We always look for bargains at the grocery, but we rarely shy away from a food item because of the expense. We go to the nearest grocery rather than the cheapest. Recently I’ve cut back on the premium liquors and have been mostly drinking Bota Box. I’ve felt at liberty to buy books whenever I want them, which is at least once a month. I indulge in the occasional MP3 download from Amazon. We have our subscription to Netflix, which I still haven’t gotten around to canceling. There’s my yoga class. What else can we cut?

I guess that new fire pit is out of the question.

I may also need to rethink my attitude toward freelance work. I routinely reject queries for basic web development and consultation. Sometimes I do the work for free. But yesterday, motivated by a recent financial embarrassment, I changed my tune and said “yes” when a friend’s husband asked for my help. I quoted PJ’s old rate, $40 an hour, with a three-hour minimum. I’m sure he charges much more now, if he even does this sort of work. Jeez, I need to raise my rates already.

Financial matters have never been my strong suit, but I’m frankly worried how we’re gonna make it.

Here’s a handy chart from Entergy.

And here’s the detailed breakdown…

As one can see at a glance, we consumed about twice as much energy in January as we did in the month before or after.

I’m particularly happy to have this baseline data, because we are getting some insulation underneath our house Monday. As I mentioned in January, there was a study which looked at four different ways of insulating beneath raised homes right here at the Musician’s Village in New Orleans. After some nagging, I finally got Dr. Samuel V. Glass to send me a preview of the study, “Moisture Control in Insulated Raised Floors in Southern Louisiana.” Glass is a research scientist in the little-known field of “Building Moisture and Durability” at the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin. The authors are presenting the research at a conference in December so it’s still not public, but you can view a news-style summary.

The main concern most people in these parts have about insulating underneath relates to moisture accumulation in the warm months. Moisture can lead to termites and mold and other bad things. From what I got out of the study, I think the number one thing that can minimize moisture problems is to just not set one’s thermostat too low in the summer.

Other than that, they seemed to find rigid foam boards and closed-cell spray foam to be the best. We are going with the latter from GreenBean. Closed-cell is purported to be the most expensive option, at least in terms of materials; it is costing us just over $2,000. I think I can also file for some sort of tax break before the end of the year.

So we’ll see what our energy consumption is like over the next year and compare. I’ll get back to you in November 2011.

A friend helped us register this domain back in the early nineties, when it was free. Since then, we have used it for a legitimate purpose; we are not cybersquatters.

Over the years, as the registered owner, I have gotten frequent inquiries about selling the domain. Most of these inquiries are not credible. They most often in the form of a one-liner e-mail, “Hey, you wanna sell that?” They rarely offer a price; it’s more common for them to ask me, “How much you want for that?” I find that sort of approach annoying and unprofessional.

Three years ago, my partner and I talked about actively seeking to sell the domain. We share a sentimental attachment to the domain, and I use it daily, but it’s the content that matters more than the address. We could move that content to another domain. We are not making money off the domain, and if someone else has a plan to do that, why not sell it and reap a little profit?

So we discussed it and came up with a price that we both found acceptable. My partner did most of the work in terms of research and arranging for an auction. But for some reason which eludes me now, we never went through with it.

Fast-forward to the present. Monday morning I got a voicemail and an e-mail from a broker looking to buy the domain, and they actually named a price — $10,000. I responded politely that the domain was not for sale. Soon I got a follow-up offer which was five times the original. I still said no. The broker made a third offer of $60K and asked “what price it would take” for us to part with the domain. I named the price my partner and I had cooked up three years ago. Now the broker wanted to know why our price was so high. She revealed their “dedicated pricing team” had appraised the domain. I won’t mention the figure here but it was substantially higher than her best offer but also much lower than our asking price.

$60K may sound like a lot of money, but keep in mind the broker would take a cut, and then my partner and I would split it, and then we’d have to pay taxes on it. I’d be lucky to see $20K. That’s still a good chunk of change, I suppose, but a dollar is definitely not what it used to be. As a matter of comparison, a couple years ago I pissed away $10K on the stock market, our tax refund this year was $9K, and Xy recently took a $20K pay cut. More money is always welcome, but I know we could absorb $20K into our annual living expenses and not even really notice.

My partner’s financial situation may be different, of course, and I need to be sensitive to that. Still, I don’t regret saying no yesterday. When I told Xy I’d turned down an offer of $60K for the domain, her response was “One million dollars, and not a penny less! Tell ‘em your crazy wife said so!” I think if we sell the domain it should be on our terms, as a result of proactively seeking to sell it, rather than waiting for a deal to fall into our laps. That would seem the best way to assure we get a good price. But what do I know? I’m simply not motivated at this point to do the work necessary. And if we are unable to sell it for the price we desire, I am willing to accept that.

Coincidentally, as I was responding to these inquiries, I was also trying to untangle a confusing and messy situation regarding a domain name that belongs to a local civic organization. My head was abuzz with domain names and other contingencies and by the end of the day I was experiencing a bit of cognitive overload. But at least I got a good night’s sleep.

Some of my friends assumed this high bill was indicative of high energy costs here in Southeast Louisiana. I don’t know how we compare to other parts of the country, but I don’t think that’s the culprit.

Rather, it’s the amount of electricity used. We clocked almost 6,000 killowatt hours over the course of that month. That’s 174.9 kwh per day. I suppose it’s possible Entergy misread the meter, but let’s assume it’s accurate for now.

How could we possibly have consumed that much energy?

I suspect the problem is lack of insulation. We thought we were in pretty good shape because the house was insulated as part of the renovation. As the seller informed us:

The exterior walls of the house have R13 fiberglass insulation throughout the house. The second floor attic has R30. The lower attic (over the kitchen area) has R19, which was the heaviest insulation that would fit between the joists over that area….

All of the [vinyl] replacement windows (which includes most of the windows in the house) are double-glazed Low E, and Energy Star rated.

However, there’s no insulation underneath the house. Since it’s raised a few feet off the ground, that means plenty of air gets underneath there and when it’s cold you can definitely feel it.

It seems that insulating beneath raised houses in New Orleans presents special challenges. I found an interesting article about this, which outlines the four basic choices: fiberglass, rigid foam board, open-cell spray foam or closed-cell spray foam.

But the more I read the more daunting it looks. I was heartened to learn that a scientific study has been mounted right here in New Orleans, using the different methods to insulate underneath twelve houses in Musicians’ Village for twelve months. But after scouring the web I couldn’t find the final report, so I contacted the principal investigator (Sam Glass at the USDA FPS) and am waiting for a reply.

It’s all further complicated by the fact that our floor could use some repairs in a few places. I assume it would be best to address these repairs before adding insulation.

I don’t think this is something I’m going to tackle myself. There are just too many variables, too many things to screw up, and more work than I have time to accomplish, what with being a public school widower and a daddy.

Oh, the joys of home ownership.

This morning James gave Xy a ride to work. I called the closest car rental place and reserved a vehicle, then went over to Banks Street Station with the girl on my hip and explained the situation to Tommie. He called me back a few hours later and said that in his opinion the car needed a new engine and should probably be considered a total loss. (We still owe $4,333.18 on it.) Progressive won’t be able to get an adjuster out until Wednesday. I picked up the rental a few hours later — about the last car available since so many people had cars flooded over the weekend — and so we are driving a Kia Spectrum for the next little while.

To be honest I’m hoping the Saturn is totaled. We have really come to dislike that car. The worst thing about it is the antitheft system which triggers improperly under certain atmospheric conditions, rendering the car unstartable for eight minutes at a go. Number two, it rides waaay too low to the ground, constantly scraping bottom over the slightest dip in the road, and as recent events illustrate that’s just not a good thing when streets are flooding. And we have numerous miscellaneous gripes over the rapid deterioration of interior details.

So I think we are going to be shopping for a car real soon. We hoped to do so anyway, but events are forcing our hand.

Our last two cars were slightly-used Saturns. I was never crazy about the product, but I liked the Saturn approach to sales: no BS, no haggling, the price listed was just the price. Alas, Saturn is no more, and I wouldn’t buy them again anyway after our frustrations with this vehicle.

Thus I feel supremely unqualified for navigating the automotive purchasing transaction.

I don’t even really know what we want. I’d kind of like something that rides higher than a standard sedan but is not so bulky as sports utility vehicle. And wouldn’t it be nice if that also could run off electricity. A hybrid hybrid if you will. I gather such things don’t exist. So we are setting our sights lower. An affordable compact wagon perhaps? Lee got an HHR and that looks pretty good to me.

Any advice is most welcome.