Gas prices suck. For many people, who have built their lives around long distance travel and large vehicles, gas prices really suck. I’ve been reading lots of articles about people who travel 120+ miles round trip to their jobs every day. Ouch. Most of those people aren’t driving hybrids either. I’m sure just about everyone has made their way to the Internet looking for ways to improve their situations. I know that I’ve been reading various posts about how to save gas. So, what am I doing? Here are the top 5 things that our family is doing to minimize our gas expenses:
1) Reduce the number of trips we make
This has been the number one easiest way to reduce our gasoline purchases. Once you start paying attention, it’s really quite amazing how many driving trips you make that aren’t really necessary. If you put a tiny bit of effort towards it, you can drastically reduce your gasoline consumption. Here is an example: Instead of zipping to the store for one or two items, we have made it a practice to only visit the grocery store when we are already taking another trip. No more quick trips to the store for that impulse dessert. The side effect of this is that we are saving gas and being forced to be more creative by whipping something up from the cupboard or refrigerator.
I’ve also reduced my driving in to work. I am fortunate to be able to work from home on most days. One of the ways I do this is through attending meetings virtually. Once I’ve established a relationship with coworkers or customers, everyone is quite happy to do business virtually, at least part of the time. I have only driven in to the office once in the last two weeks. It’s worth talking to your boss if you have the type of job that could be done from more than one place. Another option is to try to switch to a 4 day per week work schedule by working longer hours. With gas prices so high many employers are being much more flexible about how their employees do their work. It’s worth asking.
2) Carpool when going to events
In the old paradigm I never, ever carpooled. I liked having the freedom of arriving and leaving on my terms. Well, it’s a new world now. Carpooling is now sexy. I’ve actually heard people brag about saving gas by riding together. That never happened before gas prices spiked. Originally we had planned to drive ourselves to Montana in July. The plan was to caravan with my mother and aunt, and also my sister’s family. The main reason for not carpooling with my mother and aunt is that my mother has a large dog and all the dog hair that comes with having a large dog. I’m allergic to animals, as well as just about everything else on the planet (My friends call me Bubble Boy) so being in her minivan for 13-14 hours would not work for me because of all the residual hair in the van. I’d be in pretty bad shape by the time we reached our destination. We can’t take our car because it is too small to hold everyone. In the end we decided the smartest thing to do would be to rent a minivan and split it three ways. Total cost of the rental is $300. We’ll save far more than that on fuel so it just made sense. Had gas prices not gone up so much, I’m not sure we would have come up with this optimum solution. With gas prices so high, the first question we now ask is, "Do we need to take the trip and the second is, should we carpool?"
3) The driver that drives farthest takes the most fuel efficient car
My wife doesn’t have the luxury of working from home. Because of this, she drives much more than I do. It just so happens that her car is the most fuel efficient getting 25 miles per gallon. It’s not great but it beats the 20 mpg that my Toyota Tacoma gets. As a general rule we always use the Honda Accord unless we have a need to haul something. This didn’t use to be the case. We never really put much thought in to the gas mileage variation of the cars. The reality is that if we get 5 extra miles per gallon in the Honda we can get an extra 70 miles per fill up. That’s almost $12 per fill up that we are saving by simply choosing one car over the other.
4) Practice a few Hypermiling Techniques
I’m not about to scream around corners at 45 miles per hour to try to keep speed up and avoid brake usage but I am interested in doing all I can to adjust my driving to save a few bucks. The number one thing I’m doing in this area is to minimize my foot on the gas pedal. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to get run over by a 90 year old woman in her 1973 Dodge Dart, but I also don’t want to burn the rubber off my tires by tearing off the starting line. When the light turns green these days I take it nice and easy. I slowly apply gas and shift when the rpm’s hit a little over 2000 rpms. The focus here is not to wind up the engine and cram fuel in to the engine like I just robbed a convenience store and the cops are hot on my tail. I’m also trying to drive in the highest gear that keeps my speed constant with the lowest RPM’s. When I hit hills, I put it in neutral and coast as far as I can with the engine at idle. This seems like a safer approach than turning the engine off and still minimizes fuel usage.
5) Use a rewards card for fuel purchases
I posted about this earlier. We have finally hopped on the rewards card bandwagon. We chose an American Express card through Costco. We went for the business card because the fuel rewards were much higher. There doesn’t appear to be any criteria to go with a business card over a consumer card but we do have a long term Costco business membership that might have been used as the key criteria but I don’t know for sure. The business card pays 5% back for fuel purchases at Costco or other regular gas stations. We try to buy all of our fuel at Costco where it’s cheapest and then the 5% back on top of that really takes the price down. We are getting almost $2.75 per fill up back. This is clearly saving us a significant amount of money and it took the least amount of work.
Through small changes like this we are hoping to reduce the impact of high gas prices. What’s interesting is that none of these changes really took any effort. Through easy, simple changes to our routine we actually reduced our expenses and our carbon footprint. Next on our list is to explore easy ways to lower our home utility bills. I can tell you my current strategy is to cut usage of the central air conditioning by 50% this year. It’s already working. I’ve been making a much more concerted effort to open windows and create cross drafts before I consider turning on the A/C. We used to keep the thermostat on "auto" so that it just did what was needed to maintain one temperature in the house. By turning that off and tolerating a bit of temperature fluctuation, we are already seeing the reduction in our utility bill.
