So now that winter is on its way, I have turned the heat on in my house. My house has a programmable thermostat, which I love. But the question is always what to set the thermostat at.
I am a firm believer that during the summer, I should not have to sweat inside my house. Sure, I could save money by doing so, but I don’t want to. It’s how I choose to spend my money.
But I balance that out in the winter. I keep my house quite cool and always wear layers while inside. Conveniently, I love sleeping snuggled up under a bunch of blankets, so I set my thermostat fairly low at night. It does make it tough if I wake up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, but it’s not that bad.
I know a lot of people who set their heat significantly lower during the day – mine drops, but not significantly. I have cats in the house, and I would feel wrong letting the temperature getting down to 60. Yes, they have fur, but that’s not the point.
And the best part? If I’m home and things are just too cold for comfort, I can raise the temperature a few degrees by overriding the program. Easy as pie. I’m hoping to see the results of this when the next gas bill arrives. Keeping my fingers crossed that the winter budget isn’t ridiculous!
Megan is a 30-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:
In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance. It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information. It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck. While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.
While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.
Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.
So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan. I needed to budget. I needed to know what I was spending my money on. I needed to prepare for the future.
I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way. I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.
I live in St. Louis where it’s deathly humid and nasty in the summer and freezing in the winter.
In the summer we set our thermostat at 78 when we are home and 83 when we are not (this often goes back down to 80 during the really hot parts of the summer).
In the winter it’s 68 when we are home and 63 when we are not.
We have a dog so the differences aren’t significant either.
I grew up in the STL area, Tom, so I know the weather well. Here in DC, we get the same sort of summer humidity, but it doesn’t get as cold. I actually miss STL winters. A normal winter day here is 35 degrees and raining. Let me tell you, I would take 0 degrees over 35 degree rain any day.