Hey it ain't Newport Beach, their mortgage may be only a few hundred a month if they've been there a while.
I guess I had this mental image of someone on the financial edge, blindly running the whole-house air conditioning up to hundreds of dollars a month, and then wondering what happened to all the money.  The article hit the words "poor planning" a few times, which reinforced that.

My small condo's electricity runs about $18/mo, with the computer on too much.  That might be the other source of my boggle.