Betty Lin-Fisher: Thank you, Akron, but this isn't goodbye

This is my last consumer column for the Akron Beacon Journal.

While I won’t be writing a local consumer column weekly for the Beacon Journal, I’m actually not going too far and Beacon Journal readers will still be able to read my work.

After more than 28 years at the Beacon Journal, I have accepted a job as the national consumer reporter for USA Today. The paper is the flagship national publication for Gannett and its network of 200-plus local newspapers. The Beacon Journal is in that network. I start my new job Oct. 16.

Akron was supposed to be a short stay

The good news about my new job is that it is fully remote, so my husband and I aren’t leaving what has now become our adopted hometown. We've lived here longer than anywhere else and we’ve raised two children in our community.

Paul and I first arrived to Akron in 1995 from Iowa City, Iowa. We were high-school sweethearts from the Chicago suburbs who went to college near each other in Iowa on purpose (we told our parents that wasn’t true, but they were smarter than that).

In May of 1995, I graduated from the University of Iowa, got married two weeks later and arrived in Akron two weeks later to my job at the Beacon and a house we bought in West Akron. I was also diagnosed with an ulcer shortly after as that was a bit much to do in a month’s span.

I chose the Beacon Journal as my first full-time job after three internships with the then Knight-Ridder newspaper chain. I accepted the Beacon Journal’s offer to be a copy editor over an offer from The Plain Dealer. I liked that the Beacon Journal was considered the scrappier newspaper and loved the newsroom environment.

Our intention was to stay in Akron for three years and then move on to the next jobs and next city.

Fast forward 28 years — time really has flown by — and I’ve had so many opportunities. I took a chance in 1997 to return to reporting, even though I hadn’t enjoyed reporting when I was in college. I’ve since covered about everything but sports – crime, major businesses, utilities, retail, communities and medical news and features.

In 2000, the Beacon gave me another chance and made me the consumer columnist. I had no experience but was willing to learn. That was also the year that Dominion was preparing for its pilot program into deregulation of the natural gas supplier market, giving people a chance to choose their own supplier.

I decided to do something different and analyze gas prices. The best price that year was from FirstEnergy. But because deregulation was so new, the electric company offering natural gas through a sister company didn’t know it would be the best price in the competitive market. FirstEnergy also didn’t set a cap on the number of customers it would take and made the decision to take all customers, taking a loss on the product.

Cars lined up outside of FirstEnergy Solutions Fairlawn offices to turn in their contracts and lock in the best price. A vice president of advertising for FirstEnergy would tell me years later that he wanted to use the experience to teach an advertising class about the power of the press and the importance of fully planning a pricing campaign.

I’ve learned a lot about natural gas and electricity prices in the 23 years since – and I hope I’ve taught my readers well, too. Keep reading and I’ll leave you with some parting advice.

My consumer column has also given me the opportunity to share very personal things with my readers while educating about important topics.

It’s kind of fitting that my last column is running in the print edition on Oct. 8, on what would have been my late dad’s 89th birthday. I wrote a pretty personal column about a month after he died in 2019. I wanted to share the unfortunate problems my mom and our family went through when she was cut off from their credit card account two weeks after he died. We found out that even though she handled the credit card accounts, she was only considered an authorized user on the account. In the course of this, I learned that most U.S. banks do not offer spouses joint credit card accounts. One spouse is usually designated the primary account holder and the other an authorized user. That was a surprise to me and a lot of people.

Before I go, though, let me leave you with a few tidbits of advice and information:

Go to online utility guide for natural gas and electric pricing

I’ve called it job security and a curse. When I started analyzing natural gas prices in 2000 and telling people what selection I would make, I was the only reporter in the state who decided to do that. I still probably am the only journalist in the state who has taken my first-person educational approach.

My husband likes to say I’m The Gas Lady — a moniker I did not say was a dream when I was an aspiring journalist. But I know that I’ve built a readership that trusts me for natural gas and electricity advice.

But, I’ve also taught you what you need to know over these last 23 years. You know to watch the market or news of the natural gas or electricity market to see if the forecasts are predicting volatility in pricing. Before the last two years, we had a long stretch where the Standard Choice Offer (SCO) has been the best price for natural gas. The SCO was never meant to be the competitive choice consumers made, but the state-approved formula has continued to be a good one and market prices have again stabilized.

Earlier this spring, I also explained to readers that they should get on their community aggregation electric price or find a good public rate since the default electricity prices for Ohio Edison customers were going to double in June.

For one last piece of advice, I checked back in with Ella Hochstetler, director of regulatory and pricing for Dominion and Dave Jankowski, NOPEC chief marketing and communications officer.

The monthly SCO, effective Sept. 12, is $2.95 per thousand cubic feet (mcf) when rounded to the nearest penny. It has been in the $2 range since I recommended moving back to the SCO in March.

Both said the SCO is still a good choice.

“We’re expecting natural gas pricing through the winter to remain steady, even lower from what it had been last year,” said Hochstetler. “Throughout this winter heating season, the adder will remain at 39 cents. The next SCO auction will take place in February, and it will set the SCO added price from April 2024- March 2025.”

Jankowski said NOPEC’s supplier recently gave a quarterly update “and their experts are forecasting a warmer than normal start to winter in our region” so good pricing is expected in the near term. However, Jankowski said with new LNG (liquid natural gas) capacity coming online starting in late 2024, that could result in increasing prices long term. Also, there’s always the chance a bad hurricane or polar vortex could quickly impact the market, he said. A good risk-mitigation could be finding an attractive, no strings rate in the low $4 range long term, he said.

The “cheapest” public fixed rate without huge cancellation fees I could find at www.energychoice.ohio.gov was in the $4/mcf range. To me, I’m going to stay on the SCO and am not ready to lock into something that’s more than $1/mcf more than what I’ve been paying.

I have a very extensive online Utility Guide that I have put together over the years. It can be found at www.tinyurl.com/UtilityGuide It has a lot of information that I’ve written over the years, so you can take the information and use that to make your own choices. I’ve helped you with this decision for years, but it’s time for the training wheels to come off. I’m confident the lessons I’ve taught you will be enough for you to make good decisions year after year.

Betty Lin-Fisher Shopping for natural gas or electricity rates in Dominion, FirstEnergy area? Start here

Go to 'Betty’s Best Tips' for popular column topics

I also have a page — www.tinyurl.com/ABJBettysBestTips — that has links to some of the most popular consumer topics I’ve written about, such as the importance of checking your credit reports, placing credit freezes and who to notify after the death of a loved one. Those articles are still good advice.

Betty's Best Tips: Here are links to popular topics such as top scams, how to block robocalls, free credit freezes

Thank you for letting me take you on this collective journey for more than 28 years at the Beacon Journal and more than 23 writing this column.

My new email address is blinfisher@usatoday.com You can follow me on social media: @blinfisher on X, formerly known as Twitter, or Instagram and www.facebook.com/blinfisher for my professional page on Facebook.

As I mentioned earlier, readers still should be able to see some of my national consumer work in the Beacon Journal and you can also go to the Money section of www.usatoday.com

Please continue to support my Beacon Journal colleagues and local journalism. A strong local newspaper is important to our society.

This isn’t goodbye. I’ll see you around town and you’ll see me in the paper. Just in a slightly different way.

Betty Lin-Fisher can be reached at blinfisher@thebeaconjournal.com

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Departing consumer columnist Betty Lin-Fisher thanks Akron, not goodbye