We used to buy prebuy oil.
In the last two years we stopped it.
Guess,we lucked out.
A friend of mine locked in at 4.59 a gallon.
He is stuck with this.
As most thought this was going up to 5.00 a gallon.
This was the smartest move that we made.
Almost like hitting a jackpot.
Today at this time it is 2.49 a gal.and will go even lower.
How long will this last who knows.But luck was on our side.
We will see what happened.

Who knew? Who knew you'd bust in blackjack or spin three lemons on the slot machine?

Karen Colby of Bow had no idea. She and her husband locked into a prebuy oil contract last summer, believing their gamble would pay off this winter and, eventually, they'd heat their home and save money.

Sure, the price at the time was about $4.30 a gallon, but weren't prices supposed to soar even higher? Wasn't heating oil supposed to top $5 a gallon sometime this fall? Didn't it makes sense to accept your oil distributor's offer back then?

Turns out, if you gambled, you lost.

"It was hard to know what to think," said Colby, hustling into

the Steeplegate Mall with her two kids this week. "Every other year it's been a great deal, and this year it hasn't been. It's one of those things where you just have to try to look ahead, and the way everything is going, it was hard to predict that things would come down as quickly as they have."

Call it just another piece to an ugly economic puzzle. At least for some.

With all the bad news lately, with banks failing and retirement accounts sagging and foreclosures mounting and unemployment skyrocketing, this was one area that some figured held a sliver of relative good news.

Apply the brakes to rising energy prices. Get it in writing, get a handle on it, fight back.

"We've done the prebuys for many years and there was only one year, two years ago, where we came out behind," said New London's Kathy Bowers, a hospital pharmacist. "But that was only a couple of hundred dollars. We have definitely come out ahead over the years. This year, we did question doing it, but in the media, everyone thought that the price was going to go higher."

An international drop in demand for crude oil has turned everything upside down. So while we rejoice over the current price of heating oil, not to mention a gallon of gasoline, those who paid attention to recent trends and signed on the dotted line are getting slammed hard.

Bowers's loss? Try $1,600. "The price we paid was $4.52 a gallon," she said. "We bought 800 gallons."

That was the going rate, and we all thought the worst was yet to come. Then it started flowing downward, like gravy on turkey.