It takes some serious creativity to be able to stretch a paycheck these days.

• My income, like many of us, has stayed flat while the cost of having a life has continued to do nothing but rise.

I could feel all hurt about this or I could do what I have to do to make up the difference. The cost of living in this country has so many hidden facets. It’s as though every entity that I transact with is simply waiting to drop some crazy penalty on me. Just renewing the tag on my car is a chunk of money. Don’t even get me started on the insurance fees. Anyway, I started zeroing in on some of the money sucking points in our household budget. HVAC costs were way up there. That was an easy one to acknowledge. We are in a region of the country that has to deal with an awful lot of heat during about 4 or 5 months of the year. The HVAC cooling can run into the hundreds and hundreds of dollars per month. This just seemed totally ridiculous to have continue unabated. I began by installing a smart thermostat. This thing not only can precisely manage the HVAC load, it will also adjust the temps during the heat of the day when hardly anyone is around. Then, I bought some automatic blinds which work hand in hand with the smart thermostat. The thermostat will lower the blinds when it senses heating happening due to direct sunlight. We are also pushing the temperature setting up a bit in the evening. It isn’t so bad because I have been using fans to offset the higher temp setting. I’ll get the savings if they are right there for the taking.

Heating corp