Featured in local story, and missing the point on "payback"

from Truthful Living by (Sat Jiwan)

Jeremy Arias from The Gazette interviewed me, my friend Doug Horgan, and a couple other locals for an article about costs of going green. (Experts: Going green doesn't have to put you in the red, 09.09.09) There's a lot to cover on a topic like this and I think he did a nice job for a short piece, and got most of my quotes and sentiments right on. I enjoyed more of the things that came up in our interview, than what made it into the article.

He mentioned the $7000 (25%) in incentives I got in 2007 for our solar panels and about 15-20 year payback I expect. If I did the same project today combining federal, state (MD) and Montgomery County local incentives, I would get about 80% in incentives and have a payback of 5-10 years. See my recent Voice column (Apr 2009) which summarizes this (note: both MD and Montgomery County have refunded their programs as of June/July).

More on "payback":
While it's true when looking to develop a priorities list for home improvements, it makes a lot of sense to do the quickest payback items first, it's actually a bit of a red herring that you should only do things which have certain financial "paybacks"...

(article continues at: http://truthful-living.blogspot.com/2009/09/featured-in-local-story-and-missing.html )