This Retiree Got a $700 Utility Bill. She Sold Her Family Home to Cut Costs
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Lynne Ferlisi says that during a visit to her mother in Marlborough, Massachusetts, she discovered the thermostat was set at 58 degrees and the oven was on, with the door open for warmth. After receiving an $800 heating bill for her apartment, Ferlisi’s mother was looking for ways to stretch her Social Security check.
Ferlisi began helping pay her mother’s bills, but eventually, she couldn’t afford them either.
“We were pulling out of our savings,” she says. “Finally, after a year of saying, ‘Mom, we can’t afford this,’ I said, ‘We have to sell your house.’ ”
Attempts to conserve energy don’t always translate into meaningful savings, says Jason Tomcsi, communications director for AARP Indiana, which has been working to combat a rate hike proposed by an electricity company serving Indianapolis.
Here’s what you can do to help:
“The utility companies are getting these built-in increases that have nothing to do with how much you use,” he says. “It doesn’t matter how low you turn your thermostat down in the winter if there’s these fixed charges that keep on increasing.”
Utility bills include not just usage rates but sometimes also “rider” fees influenced by storm recovery, grid repairs, fuel costs, investments in new technologies or agreements to supply energy to data centers.
Spending on new infrastructure projects rose more than 14 percent from 2024 to 2025, up from about 4 percent in the period between 2023 and 2024, according to PowerLines.
In states like California, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Georgia, AARP has been fighting to increase oversight of fixed charges and protect the role of consumer advocate offices.
Ensuring ratepayers aren’t footing the bill for data centers is another priority for AARP. We’ve urged utility companies in states like Florida and Oregon to set distinct rate classes for new large-energy users up front, to prevent their costs from shifting to consumers.
More than three-quarters of adults 50-plus across the political spectrum believe large data centers should bear those costs, and most agree that state policymakers should protect consumers, according to a report from AARP Research.
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