POWER to the people...

As most of y'all know, I'm pretty ridiculously OCD about all things financial and any other thing that I can force into a list or spreadsheet.

Our current Finances spreadsheet has 11 tabs: Monthly Expenses, Checking Balance, Debt Payoff Schedule, Assets, Retirement Contributions, Retirement Balances, Net Worth, Escrows, List of Credit Accounts, Credit Reports & Scores, and Income Taxes.

And that's just for our current stuff.

I also have an archived spreadsheet (dating back to July 2006) that has another Debt Payoff Schedule [all of which are paid off] and our savings plan for our down payment and closing costs.

Yes. I'm serious.

I'm so serious that I have a program running in the background of my laptop that backs up our current Finances workbook every night at 11 p.m. to one of our desktop computers that we use for extra storage space.

I'm totally fascinated by this stuff--to the point where I might seriously consider being a personal financial planner.

So once we were seriously considering buying a house, I got pretty psycho about making sure that we could afford everything about it. I extrapolated our power bill at our apartment and budgeted $200/month total for our Progress Energy and PSNC bills. I know that there will probably be months when it's lower than that amount and the occasional amounts where it's higher.

We received a bill from Progress Energy right after we moved in but it was only for a partial month and during that time we had quite a few days where the thermostat was set in the high 60s or low 70s with the door wide open because of movers, service repair people, deliveries, etc. Plus, we didn't have our fan up in our living room. So, I couldn't really figure out too much from our first bill.

Well, imagine my surprise today when we got our first full bill: it was $113.31 for 30 days (some of which were 100+ degree days!). I was pretty pleased because our PSNC bill has been the standard $10 for a service connection. We haven't really used any gas because we only have it for our fireplace and our heat, neither of which we've used. I figure $123.31 isn't too bad, considering I had budgeted for much more!

We actually used fewer kwh in June of this year at our house than we did last year in our apartment--even though our house is more than twice as big as our apartment and the average daily temperature was 2 degrees higher this year!

Yay for new-construction efficiency!

Now, on the flip side, I have no idea what is going to happen in the winter when we switch over to gas heat (esp. considering PSNC was just granted two rate hikes). Fortunately, Brian and I both like the house to be pretty cool, so we can set our thermostat pretty low and be OK.

Question, though, for any of you who have a natural gas logs fireplace. In the winter, is it better to set your thermostat temperature lower than normal and then use your fireplace more often or is it better to set the temperature higher and use the fireplace more sparingly? I don't know what uses less gas...

Because our fireplace is in our main "living" area, I think we could set the temperature pretty low downstairs and then run the fireplace when we're watching TV. (We have a separate thermostat upstairs, so we could set the temperature a bit warmer up there.)

Also, just because I'm curious, I put a poll up on the left side of the blog about the temperature at which you keep your thermostat set during the summer months. If you don't mind, please answer it so that I can see what the general consensus is. We currently set ours at 78.

We're planning to put in programmable thermostats pretty soon, but for right now we have the nonprogrammable kind.