Do Your Children Light Up Your Life?

In this case I'm not talking about their beautiful shiny smiling faces! I'm talking about the lights, TVs and video game consoles that are left on with no one around; the electric meter on the outside of the house spinning so fast it's starting to smoke. All I can imagine is some big CEO at the electric company flipping through a yacht catalog smiling as my children and ones like them contribute to the companies billion dollar profit margin.

To solve this problem at our house we came up with Project OFF. OFF stands for Our Fun Fund! We had a talk with our children about how much our electric bill was. We set an amount for what we thought it should be at the high end. We told the kids that we would much rather spend money on fun things rather than lights to light a room no one was in.

We told the kids that every month when the electric bill came in we would show them what it was. If the amount was less than the set amount, the difference would be put in the Our Fun Fund. The fund can be saved or used at the time for whatever it is they all agree to whether it's an outing to get Happy Meal's, a new video game or to be saved for something even bigger.

To our surprise it really has made a difference! Our electric bills on average have been $20.00 to $38.00 less a month than the amount we set the high end to be. Of course, an added perk to this, they're doing their part for the environment and that too makes the kids feel good.

Find out more about saving energy with your kids here: http://www.energyquest.ca.gov/saving_energy/index.html