I've decided that the next expense I'm going to tackle for optimization is transportation, specifically the amount of gas I use. My transportation expenses take up a rather large portion of my budget. Gas, insurance, and the sinking fund for car repairs/replacement take up about 16% of my total expenses. The "experts" recommend 10-15% and I'd like to eventually get it at least down to the lower end of that range.
Insurance is something that I've recently shopped around for and unfortunately, due to the horrible year my husband had last year, insurance is going to be a killer for at least the next 4-5 years. I increased my deductible a little to help, but other than that I'm not sure I can bring it down any lower without drastically cutting coverage, which is something I'm a bit hesitant to do right now.
The sinking fund is something that I always debate including in my transportation costs rather than my savings rate, but in the end, I look at it as a car payment. It's just one that I'm making to myself. So I include it. It's not quite as high as I'd like it to be right now, but it's getting there.
That just leaves gas. My commute is...well, let's just say that there is absolutely nothing frugal about my commute. It's 30 miles each way and I drive a gas guzzling SUV (but I love her). I live in the land of little to no public transportation. There is a program at work to connect people with vanpools that are subsidized. I've been on that waiting list for nearly a year now. In fact, writing this post made me realize that I needed to reach out to the coordinator for that program to let him know I'm still interested.
Until a vanpool materializes, I'm kind of left working on being more aware of how I drive. Specifically, I've been paying closer attention to keeping the RPMs under 2000. As a sidebar, I found this tip on a YouTube video on "Tips to Save Money." I don't usually find these helpful because all of the tips are things that I already do. But every once in awhile I come accross something that I hadn't considered before. This was one of these times.
Doing this for the past three or four months has cut my average miles per gallon from 17 to 20. That doesn't sound like all that much, but the math tells us that 30 miles per trip at 17mpg = ~1.75 gallons and 30 miles per trip at 20mpg = 1.5 gallons. That means I'm using .25 fewer gallons per leg of my commute, or a half a gallon less each day.
In two weeks, I work 9 days, so that saves 4.5 gallons every two weeks. Gasbuddy tells me that gas is currently $2.24/gallon in my area or $2.17 if I can catch a 7 cent off promotion through one of the loyalty card programs. Four and a half gallons less a week at those prices is about $5/week less in gas that I'm having to spend. That adds up to about ~$250 each year. That's just shy of 1% of my total expenses. It's not going to get my transportation numbers entirely where I want them, but I'm a big believer that every percent is a win.
Because of this, I've been doing some reading on hypermiling, and while I maintain that some of the more extreme techniques are dangerous, there are definitely some other things I've found helpful to incorporate to my commute. I think the next thing I'm going to concentrate on is doing a better job at anticipating stops in traffic and keeping a larger distance between myself and the cars in front of me. Both of these things, in theory, decrease the amount of braking needed and increase fuel efficiency.
