Utilities? (Grand Junction: real estate, rentals, homes)

[wanttoretire]

Actually we are looking at the Boise area but mostly at the Northern Idaho area. The vehicle registration tax is somewhere in the $60. range or maybe less, it's not a personal tax like Nevada and I think Colorado has. Also, I believe I read that the property taxes have an owner occupied exemption of $100,000 or somewhere in the neighborhood so if a home cost $250,000 then only the $150,000 part of it would actually be taxed. But yes, I must consider every single expense in my spreadsheet between the two including utility costs which is actually why I initiated this post in order to get actual figures and facts to start with.
Thanks for your input.

[Mike from back east]

Utility costs: https://www.city-data.com/forum/color...utilities.html

Property taxes here are lower than many places. Besides the official method of calculating property taxes, you can multiply the market price by .6 to get at the approximate amount, i.e., tax on a $500k house is $3000 per year. That's close enough for seat of the pants calculating.

[wanttoretire]

Thanks for the links on rates, they were really helpful. I live in Las Vegas and I checked to see what exactly I paid in January for all those utilities combined. The chart provided said it was about $208 for the month of January. Just so people know what to expect in Vegas, the actual total for January 2007 for us was $258. In the summer months the electric bill all by itself without the other utilities is higher then the total of the January utilities combined.

In any event, the utility costs in Colorado Springs sounds very appealing to me but unfortunately we are looking at the Western Slope and I think they may be much higher there.

If anyone has an actual figure from Grand Junction or Cedaredge on what they paid in January of this year for their gas bill I sure would like to have that.
Thanks

[COflower]

I posted in your other thread...if you you are looking to utitilty rates in Grand Junciton, they are similar to those in Denver.

Originally Posted by wanttoretire

Thanks for the links on rates, they were really helpful. I live in Las Vegas and I checked to see what exactly I paid in January for all those utilities combined. The chart provided said it was about $208 for the month of January. Just so people know what to expect in Vegas, the actual total for January 2007 for us was $258. In the summer months the electric bill all by itself without the other utilities is higher then the total of the January utilities combined.

In any event, the utility costs in Colorado Springs sounds very appealing to me but unfortunately we are looking at the Western Slope and I think they may be much higher there.

If anyone has an actual figure from Grand Junction or Cedaredge on what they paid in January of this year for their gas bill I sure would like to have that.
Thanks

[COflower]

Originally Posted by COflower

I posted in your other thread...if you you are looking to utitilty rates in Grand Junciton, they are similar to those in Denver.

My "bad" I was thinking of another person asking the same question.

Odd that.

[suzco]

Threads have been merged.

[jazzlover]

Another thing to consider: Retail natural gas prices have been artificially cheap in the Rocky Mountain West for years because the area is a big producer of natural gas, but there has been insufficient pipeline capacity to export the gas from the region to the West Coast, Midwest, and East. Several new pipelines are now coming on-line or will in the next 6-18 months to transport huge quantities of natural gas out of the region to those markets. As that happens, Colorado retail natural gas suppliers will see their wholesale costs for natural gas increase significantly (in fact, that has already begun). I would fully expect retail natural gas costs in Colorado to increase by a minimum of 50% in the next 12-18 months. If the national natural gas price continues to increase as it has recently, that may be a way low estimate. The days of cheap heating in Colorado, such as they were, are over. Oh, since Colorado also has a number of natural gas-fired electric power plants, you can expect to see electric rates head upward, too, as those increased natural gas costs get entered into the rate base. Just another 2x4 to hit feckless McMansion owners in Colorado right between the eyes--funny thing, they never want to be told it's coming. I guess they figure ignorance is bliss. Not.

[wanttoretire]

If all Jazzlover is saying is factual it really doesn't sound very promising to even consider Colorado for retirement. I'll have to call my sister-in-law who lives in Colorado and ask her or her husband about all this. How can retired people on fixed incomes afford this kind of increase not to mention those struggling families that are still working? Last year on these posts I was reading about water shortages in Colorado on the Western Slope but my in-laws kind of blew that off. Well, it looks as though I will be having some more research to do about this now.

[jazzlover]

Originally Posted by wanttoretire

If all Jazzlover is saying is factual it really doesn't sound very promising to even consider Colorado for retirement. I'll have to call my sister-in-law who lives in Colorado and ask her or her husband about all this. How can retired people on fixed incomes afford this kind of increase not to mention those struggling families that are still working? Last year on these posts I was reading about water shortages in Colorado on the Western Slope but my in-laws kind of blew that off. Well, it looks as though I will be having some more research to do about this now.

Well, you can read the natural gas prices at various US points right here:

Intercontinental Exchange Firm Physical Natural Gas Prices

The "Henry Hub" price is considered the best indicator of the national price by most people in the industry. The "Opal" price (named after Opal, Wyoming; and it's pronounced Oh-PAL, not OH-pul) is the price usually quoted for natural gas produced in SW Wyoming and NW Colorado. There has been as much as a 40% gap in those prices (with the Opal price being lower), but with the new pipelines coming on line, that gap has narrowed to $1-$2 per MCF now. There's your proof.

If you want some really boring reading, you can also pore over the almost continual rate filings that the gas and electric utilities make with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission ( Colorado Public Utilities Commission Public Notice of Applications Filed ).

By the way, natural gas rates actually went down some this last winter because several of those new pipelines weren't on-line yet, and gas production in the state had increased significantly. That "windfall" is over, and everyone I talk to in the industry expects substantial rate hikes to be in the offing by this winter.

Coal prices are also headed higher (article here from today: Coal price hikes boost electric rates, more increases coming | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle (broken link) ). Colorado relies heavily on coal for electricity generation. Most of that coal either comes from mines in Colorado or the Powder River Basin in Wyoming. Higher coal prices will translate into higher electric rates.

The last straw is propane. Propane is generally produced as a byproduct of oil production. Oil production in the Rocky Mountain West is, by most accounts, "mature," with most fields in decline. Wyoming managed a small increase in oil production last year, mostly by the use of very expensive enhanced recovery techniques on old fields, but few I know in the industry expect that trend to continue. Colorado's oil production declined in 2007, and has been declining for years. So, the days of cheap propane are probably over, too.

Time to turn out the lights and buy a sweater.

[Bideshi]

Originally Posted by jazzlover

.
Time to turn out the lights and buy a sweater.

We're doing that already.