On the last Sunday of September, I sat at the kitchen table with the green notebook, the spreadsheet Emily built for us and a stack of statements held together with a binder clip. Greg was watching the Bengals downstairs on the antenna. I spent the afternoon putting twelve months of utility bills in one place, October 2025 through September 2026, and comparing them against the twelve months before.
This was a year of changes. We switched gas suppliers in the fall, cut cable in November, went down to two phone lines in March, got caught by an expired electric contract in May and replaced an old freezer in July. I wanted to see whether any of it added up.
The year, month by month
Here's the whole year for electric, gas, water and sewer, internet and phone. These are the amounts paid each month, rounded to the dollar.
- October: electric $98, gas $38, water $58, internet and TV $189, phone $140
- November: electric $92, gas $96, water $54, internet and TV $189, phone $140
- December: electric $108, gas $184, water $55, internet $74, phone $140
- January: electric $121, gas $286, water $56, internet $74, phone $140
- February: electric $104, gas $211, water $54, internet $74, phone $140
- March: electric $96, gas $142, water $56, internet $74, phone $70
- April: electric $88, gas $78, water $57, internet $74, phone $70
- May: electric $112, gas $46, water $60, internet $74, phone $70
- June: electric $141, gas $34, water $63, internet $74, phone $70
- July: electric $196, gas $31, water $66, internet $74, phone $70
- August: electric $178, gas $30, water $64, internet $74, phone $70
- September: electric $132, gas $32, water $59, internet $74, phone $70
Totals for the year: electric $1,466, gas $1,208, water and sewer $702, internet and TV $1,118, phone $1,190. All together, $5,684. The year before, the same five bills came to $7,500. That's $1,816 less, or about $151 a month.
Where the savings came from
Most of it came from the two easiest changes, which had nothing to do with energy at all.
Cutting cable saved $1,150 over the year, comparing $2,268 the year before to $1,118 now. We do pay $11.99 a month for one streaming service on a card, so the real savings is closer to $1,000. Greg has made peace with the antenna. He still misses the channel guide.
Going to two phone lines in March saved $490 in seven months, and will save $840 in a full year.
Electric came in at $1,466, down from $1,712. Part of that is the supplier rate, part of it is that Josh lived in Indianapolis this summer instead of in his old bedroom with a fan and a computer running all night, and part of it is the freezer. The May bill is the one I'm least proud of. It's the month our fixed rate expired and rolled to 12.4 cents before I caught it. We're now on a 12-month fixed at 9.4 cents.
Water and sewer dropped a little, from $744 to $702, which is mostly fewer people and fewer loads of laundry.
Where it went up
Gas went the wrong way, $1,208 against $1,096 the year before. That surprised me at first, since we locked a fixed rate of $0.62 per Ccf last September. But the fixed rate protects the price, not the weather. January's cold snap gave us a $286 bill, the highest in the notebook, and February wasn't much kinder. We simply used more gas. By my math, the fixed rate still saved us something like $130 over the winter compared with what the default rate would have charged. It just couldn't make the winter warmer.
Our gas contract ended with the September read, and I've already signed a new 12-month fixed rate, a little higher than last year. I'll write about that soon.
What I'd tell myself a year ago
The biggest savings weren't the clever ones. They were the bills we'd stopped questioning, cable and phone, paid automatically for years because that's what they always were.
The energy side is worth doing, but it needs attention. A fixed rate is only fixed until it isn't, and you have to show up when the contract ends.
And keeping every bill in one place made this whole post possible in an afternoon. I'm in my 24th year of the notebook. Greg says I should get a bigger one. He came upstairs at halftime, looked over my shoulder at the total and said, "Huh." From Greg, that's a standing ovation.
This month we're trying a practice run at living on a fixed retirement-style budget. Having this year laid out side by side makes that a lot less scary.
