We just wanted to wish everyone a happy and peaceful Memorial Day. We hope that you are spending some quality time relaxing and enjoying your day. It is certainly a hot one here in New York, and the Air Conditioners are running at full blast. This leads me to a tip that we wanted to share with you that might save you a few dollar per month.
Basically, rates are constantly on the increase from the electric company, and they give you every reason under the sun (no pun intended) for these increases. However, there are two options that you can look into that might save you some money, so let's address them both here:
Your first option would be to call your electric company/utility (on Long Island, ours is LIPA), and ask them what it would cost per month to be put on a "budget billing plan". What they will do is to calculate an average monthly payment, and with your permission, will change you to that fixed monthly payment. The benefits of this are immediately obvious if you take this plan when the summer begins. The reasoning is that if, for example, you spend $300 per month during the summer (air conditioner, pool filter, etc), and you pay $100 per month during the winter, your summer payments will drop dramatically. The drawback is that when the winter comes, your payments will be slightly higher (there are less months of running the Air Conditioner vs. not running it). Also, it makes it easier for your own personal budgeting, in that you know what the payments will be each month, and there will be no "surprises". We have been doing this, and when the 12-month billing cycle was over, we were actually faced with a surplus, which was credited back to us. That is actually a great surprise!
Your second option, which you can do concurrently with the first option, is to speak with your neighbors and get a sense of what they are paying. If you see a large disparity between what they are paying for a similar type of home and similar type of appliances (important!) and what you are paying, contact the electric company and request an audit. They will do some back-end review, and will probably send someone out to your home to review your infrastructure, as well as send you a link to their website to run a manual energy audit.
These are all good ideas for you to look into and we hope that they save you some money.
Do you have any other tips that we did not touch on here? We would love to hear. Please send us your comments to this post.
We will be posting more this week, as there are a lot of very exciting things going on here that will have a significant impact on your search for a Rent to Own Home, or to help you Rent to Own your home.
Have a Great Holiday and Happy Rent-to-Owning !
