With this last trip to Indy I was watching the price of gas because every ten cents of gas price increase cost me roughly $20.00 $10.00 [editor: fixed bad math from tiredness] more for the trip. My car is a Honda CRV, it gets roughly 32 miles per hour (not the EPA gas rating, but with AC and various other things in play, that’s the average). I had to drive over 1,000 miles and so that meant about four fill ups (including driving around in Indiana) per direction. Each tank fill up was 12 gallons or so [it holds 14 gallons, but you have to pick where you can get gas driving through Kansas]. We ended up paying closer to $4.00 a gallon at most locations. The first lesson learned: know the gas math of your trip so you’re not surprised.

I mentioned the $4.00 a gallon above. We left on Memorial Day Weekend. This is a classic time for gas stations to jack prices up. Somehow they don’t call it price gouging I watched the price of gas jump by ten cents between Thursday and Saturday when we left. By taking a day off and leaving one day earlier, I could have saved some money (though it would have cost me a day off).

Lastly, we’ve still got one Discover card and this Discover card has a special 5% cash back bonus on various purchased at different times of the year. We’re doing our best to pay off the discover card as quickly as possible. However, since I knew we’d be spending so much money on gas we pre-paid the amount we had budgeted for gas on the discover card to get the cash back bonus. This is part of a paradigm shift I’ve gone through, but I’ll write about that later. Credit cards are a major temptation when our minds aren’t focused on heavenly things and so we get caught up in their trap - a clarifying blog post will be forthcoming. We’re not using credit cards for credit, this was a pre-paid spend that will allow us to get some relief, minor as it is, on the cost of gas. We didn’t use it for anything but pre-paid, known expenses and came out having pre-paid more on the card than we spent. Between June and September Discover is offering 5% cash back on gas - we’re going to participate in that discount.

So: remember to do the gas math, remember to plan, as best as you can, around known pricing schedules, and figure out how to maximize your dollar.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 6:40 am and is filed under Debt, Debt Redux, General, Tips'n'Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.