I had a weird thought, and I know I can’t act on this right away, but it’s pretty interesting. One thing we all worry about it our utility bills, right? I happen to be pretty lucky because a little while ago I had solar panels put on my roof. Had to do the roof anyway and figured I’d go all the way. I don’t store the power locally but just put the power back into the grid. That means that in a large part of the summer, my electric meter runs backwards!
Last year, I went 5 months that I paid about 25 dollars for my whole bill which is both gas and electric. That is, I paid 25 dollars total for those 5 months, not 25 dollars a month. I’m very happy with that. In the wintertime of course things change. I use more natural gas because we turn off the air conditioning and fire up the furnace. Also, the hot water heater has to work a little harder, I guess. The clothes dryer is the only other natural gas item, and that remains about the same.
Anyway, since my bills go up in the winter, I did some averaging and my total utility bill for the year comes to about 1200 dollars and I’m being generous there. I didn’t pull actual figures, just guesstimating. It will do for the sake of this idea.
My utility company is a publicly traded company. The stock runs about 71 dollars a share, and the dividend is $2.52 per share per year. I divided 1200 by 2.52 and got 476 (roughly). To buy, let’s say 480 shares, it would be $34,560.00 right now. That means that if I won the lottery (I probably ought to play if I expect to win), and I parked $35,000 dollars in my utility’s stock, it will mean that I didn’t actually have a utility bill at all!
If I were to use actual figures, it would probably be less than that, but I just wanted to play around with the idea. I also realize that I could just use my dividends from all my stocks to pay my bill, but the idea of the utility itself paying my bills kind of tickles me. I’m not moving forward with this idea, mostly because I don’t have $35,000 dollars right now, but also because it’s kind of a crazy idea.
In other news, the stock market seems to be doing pretty well for the start of 2026. Things are looking pretty good and yesterday a number of my stocks did well. I have both Chevron and Exxon Mobil in my portfolio and with the Venezuela situation now, they are seeing some pretty good gains. Maybe I should get a couple other Gasoline Company stocks, like Marathon and Phillips66 or Valero. But for now I am happy with what I have.
There is some job report coming out that people are looking at and of course we all want to find out what the FED is going to do with interest rates. I believe that they will stay the same for now personally, but I have been wrong before!
My Intel stocks are doing well with their announcement about the 18A process of chips and it looks like they may do a good job for the rest of the year (in my mind). Some of the FIN stocks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America didn’t do well in their quarterly reports but all the FIN stocks are reeling from the announcement about the 10% cap on interest rates on credit cards. I have always felt like the interest rate was too high on credit cards, which I guess is why I don’t have any. The banks are saying that without the high interest rates, the risk of people not paying back is higher and thus they won’t be sending out many new credit cards to people.
Does that mean that if we need to miss a payment once that we are paying for all those people who carry high amounts on their card constantly? I guess it does, and that doesn’t seem fair either. It’s kind of like setting car insurance rates based on the number of people who drive like maniacs and get into accidents constantly. I don’t care for that either.
2026 is a midterm election year and from what I hear that will mean a lot of volatility in the market. I’m not sure why that is but it seems to be things that the experts are saying. It could be a rough ride since elections are so controversial these days. I can’t wait for all the political advertisements on TV, can you? I’m kidding. I hate those things.
But for now I am happy with the way things are going. I am looking forward to implementing my new latest strategy for stock purchases. I haven’t worked it all out yet. I have a couple of fun experiments I might do. But time will tell. I am still overthinking things and run late on doing things that would have paid off if I just did it and didn’t think about it so much!
