It is 7:15 on a Tuesday night and the electric bill is sitting on the kitchen counter next to a cold cup of decaf. I have paid this bill every month since 1999. Tonight is the first time I have actually read it, line by line, the way I would read a permission slip before signing it.
That is more or less why this blog exists.
Who is writing this
My name is Diane Mercer. I am 55, I live in Franklin, Ohio, in a 1977 split-level that Greg and I bought in May of 1999 for $112,000, and for the last 24 years I have been the front-office secretary at an elementary school in a nearby district. I answer phones, I find lost lunchboxes, I know which second grader is allergic to strawberries. In June I am leaving. Nobody is pushing me out. My knees are tired, I am tired, and when Greg and I sat down with the numbers, they worked. Barely, but they worked.
Greg has driven a delivery route for a regional bakery distributor for 27 years. His alarm goes off at 3:40 in the morning and he is home by 1:30, which means he is asleep by 8:30 and I have the evenings to myself and the green notebook.
The green notebook is a spiral notebook where I have written down every bill we have paid since 2003. Gas, electric, water, phone, insurance, the mortgage. Our daughter Emily, who is 27 and an ICU nurse in Columbus, finally talked me into a spreadsheet last year. I still keep the notebook. Old habits.
Why the house feels different
Our son Josh is 21 and in the mechanical engineering co-op program at the University of Cincinnati. He lived at home every summer until last August, when he moved into an apartment near campus full time. Emily left for nursing school back in 2017 and married Nate in 2023. So as of last fall, it is Greg, me and Biscuit, an orange tabby who was supposed to be Emily's and has decided he belongs to Greg.
The house is 1,720 square feet on three levels. It was built for a family, and for 25 years it held one. Now there are two bedrooms upstairs with the doors closed and a family room downstairs where nobody plays video games. It is quiet in a way I did not expect. I'll leave that there.
What I did not expect was how the bills would change, or rather, how they would stay the same while everything around them changed.
What the electric bill taught me tonight
Here is what is on the counter. Our February usage was 742 kWh. The total is $118.40. I always assumed that was just what electricity cost, one number from one company. It turns out Ohio lets you choose who supplies the electricity itself, while the utility still owns the wires and delivers it. On our bill, the supply part is charged at what they call the price to compare, about 10.6 cents per kWh. That alone is roughly $78.65 of the $118.40. The rest is delivery and fixed charges, and those I cannot shop.
I did not know any of this. I have balanced a school activity fund to the penny for two decades, and I did not know my own electric bill had two halves. That is a little embarrassing, and I would rather be embarrassed at 55 than at 65.
There is a state comparison chart, the PUCO's Apples to Apples list, that shows supplier offers side by side. I have not done anything yet. I am going to read it properly first, the same way I just read this bill.
What I plan to write about
This is not a money advice blog. I am not an advisor, and when something is over my head I will say so and tell you we talked to someone who does this for a living. It is a record of what one ordinary couple in southwest Ohio actually pays and actually decides, written down so I can see it, and maybe so you can see yours.
- Utilities: electric, gas, water, phone, internet, and what can be shopped.
- Insurance and health coverage, which is about to get complicated when I leave the school.
- Retirement money, from someone who has never once enjoyed thinking about it.
- The house, the yard and a kitchen that now cooks for two.
- The quieter parts of having grown kids, in small doses.
Our mortgage is a 15-year we refinanced in 2012 at 3.5 percent, $893 a month for principal and interest. It is scheduled to end in 2027. Greg and I are talking about paying extra this year to finish it sooner. I will tell you how that goes.
Greg just walked through on his way to bed, saw the bill, the notebook, the laptop and me, and said, "Are we in trouble?" We are not in trouble. I am just paying attention. It is about time.
