Brian and I are doing what we can to hit a savings goal. (Thanks Dave Ramsey) That means I pore over the budget and keep taking little bits and pieces of our monthly spending and tucking it into the savings fund. I was looking at (and grumbling at) the gas portion of our budget tonight and wondering what I could to to take that money and put it where I wanted it!
Here’s my idea. Take one week a month and do NO driving during that week. My budget is on 4-week cycles instead of months, so theoretically, that could save us 25% of our gas budget. It will teach me how to plan ahead better, it will help me drive more efficiently (combine trips… the day after my week is over, i bet I will go to a bunch of places at once).
Another idea is to do no driving except once per week. If you’re a working person, then you could do no driving except work except once a week. Maybe that means doing errands on Sunday since you’re out for church anyway. Brian and I really enjoy doing grocery shopping and Home Depot together… and weekends would be a nice day to try this on.
So, I’m not sure what the best idea is, but with gas well over $4 a gallon and climbing, I think my friends will forgive me if I limit my driving days.
What do you all think? Have you changed anything since gas has doubled in a few years? Do you have any other ideas?
Our calendar:
We are going to do two no-driving weeks this summer. Once Brian needs to drive to work due to bad weather (instead of biking), we’ll do September and October with one or two driving days a week. I’ll let you know if it saves us money!
Put these on your calendar!
NO DRIVING WEEKS:
July 13-19 (except church)
August 17-23rd
Nice work guys. Stay strong with it, its really hard so far. Just remember
to Live like noone else so that later you can live like noone else.
Hope to hear ya on the radio someday yellin “FREEEEEDOMMMM”
yeah I hate being limited by gas prices…. but it sure has made an impact for us too 🙁 So we think twice before going anywhere that’s not work. And we wish you lived a lot closer! Dad pays over $200 to fill up the truck & digger now. ugh. Good luck on your svgs acct. — without ours we would have been in trouble this year with the economic turndown.
That was a depressing entry. So I want to end on a good note — like Pete said — GOOD JOB 🙂
We too are trying to stay home this summer. If we can get away with only driving the van on Sundays that will help. Roy’s car gets good gas mileage and he runs all the errands while he is already in town. What is going to set us back this year is the 3 road trips we are making. Roy is taking the car to ID so that helps. When we go to his parents we will take the van. But the trip that will kill us is Family Camp in the suburban. But it will be worth it just to send my kids over to your camp to bother you every day! I can’t wait!
PS Can Brian bike to work? Roy used to when we lived in town. Does he need to borrow a bike?