Aidan Struve is 23, farms roughly 500 acres of corn, soybeans, alfalfa and oats outside Woodward, Iowa, and runs seven tractors, two semitrailer trucks and a combine. Keeping all of that fueled ran him about $11,500 last year; this year it’s on track for $18,000. His response isn’t a spreadsheet — it’s skipping repairs on the equipment and hoping nothing breaks during harvest, cutting back hay deliveries, seeing friends less and picking up hours on residential construction crews. “You just have to suffer through and work harder,” he told the Journal’s Terell Wright and Jennifer Hiller. That’s one household’s energy budget. Yours has the same three lines on it.
The numbers behind him: diesel was $6.36 a gallon on Saturday against $3.70 a year ago, per AAA, after a global fuels crunch pushed it to records; regular gasoline was $4.38 against $3.15. The Journal’s chart of the past year shows the diesel line stepping up hard in March and again in September, with gasoline climbing more gently underneath it. In Allentown, Pa., Enid Santiago, 46, an airline customer-service worker with four kids, now pays $80 to fill the minivan, up from $50 earlier this year, and has trimmed restaurants, the kids’ activities and entertainment to hold the mortgage and the car insurance. Nobody in the story is doing anything exotic. They’re doing what a budget does when one line nearly doubles: squeezing the lines next to it.
The bill you don’t see is the one that breaks
Then there’s the meter. Electricity prices rose 3.8% in August from a year earlier, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while consumer prices overall rose 3.4% — power is now outrunning the index. Ed Kirkman, 55, who runs ChaCha’s Hiland Bakery in Des Moines, says his electricity is up nearly 30% in a year and that he may have to cut hours for his 25 employees or close one or two days a week. The causes aren’t one villain. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s research points to state renewable plans and the replacement of aging or storm-damaged grid gear; new AI data centers get much of the blame, and the Journal notes their effect has been mixed — they’ve held costs down in some places and pushed them up where supply is tight. Hot or cold weather spikes the bill on top of all that.
Here’s the part worth underlining. Struve’s way of paying for diesel is to stop maintaining the machines that burn it. That’s the oldest move in a tight budget — fund the visible bill by starving the invisible one — and it works right up until the combine quits in October.
Our read
This is Cash Flow · M5. Fuel and utilities are the two budget lines households most often carry at last year’s number, because they vary month to month and nobody enjoys looking. Re-base them now: take your actual gallons and kilowatt-hours from the past 12 months and price them at today’s rates, not at the figure you penciled in last winter. If the gap is real, close it from the discretionary lines — Santiago’s playbook — rather than from maintenance, insurance or the retirement contribution, which is Struve’s. Deferred upkeep isn’t savings; it’s a loan from your future self at a lousy rate.
On the portfolio side, the energy sleeve the books hold — ExxonMobil (XOM) in 34 books, Chevron (CVX) in 37 — is the hedge against exactly this kind of bill, and it’s been earning its keep this year; held at weight, nothing added. We can’t tell you where diesel goes next, and neither can the people selling it. We can tell you a budget priced for $3.70 diesel is already wrong. Fifteen minutes with the fuel and power lines now beats discovering the shortfall when the furnace kicks on.