My biggest money saving challenge yet

I’m so excited!  I have a new adventure beginning on Monday and it’s a pretty stout undertaking.  If you thought getting our grocery budget down to $300 a month for our family of 9 was amazing, you’ll want to stick around and see how we do with our newest challenge.

It has everything to do with electricity.  That stuff that seems to run our lives, make our budgeting decisions for us, and is viewed as a necessity in our society.  When I go to my first OB appointment one of the initial questions I’m asked if I have electricity and running water.  If you say no to this, you get put on that list and will most likely have a social worker visit in a matter of days.
Our society views electricity as uber important.

And for a lot of people electricity is a medical necessity, or just being able to just flip on the lights is that important.  But maybe it shouldn’t be, at least not for everybody. 

I’ve done a little reading on this lately.  Did you realize that electricity is largly unnecessary?  For more than a few centuries our world thrived without it, and many societies still live without it today. 
When I realized how much we have actually been paying for this non-necessity, I decided to do a little research and find out what steps I could take to significantly bring down our electricity costs.  And what I found was drastic, stunning, and completely do-able in our situation. 

So, I have a goal.

A Big Goal.

Big.

HUGE!

You know how I like an impossible challenge?  This is one of those.

My goal is to get our electric bill down from around $350 to under $100. 

That’s $100 a month.  For electricity. For our family of almost 10.

Sound impossible?  Maybe we won’t be able to accomplish it.  But listen to this (or read it, because, ya know, you’re online)…

I recently read about a family of 15 who has managed to get and keep their electric bill down to about $65 a month (and they’re working on cutting that in half!).  You have to go read about it – this family is totally inspirational!  While I’m not quite as adventures as they are, not yet at least, I do think most of their ideas are excellent and, like I said, very doable in my family’s situation, and I’m always up for a challenge (unless it has to do with running or something equally as dumb Carrie B.).  It also doesn’t hurt that The Pilot is completely on-board with this new adventure.

We’re starting on Monday and are going to try the majority of our new ideas during the week.  It’ll take a while to get ourselves acclimated to this new routine but the savings will be well worth it all.

I’m hoping that’s the case anyway.

Will update…

Tagged with: pinch a penny • pinch-a-penny • things i've tried

Filed under: Uncategorized

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