Are you ready to save big money on your fuel bill for transportation? Name me one person who isn't, and I'll show you someone with too much money. The key to saving lots of money on fuel for your vehicle is to use less.
I know it sounds obvious, but many of us get hung up on saving money by getting more miles per gallon. That's fine, but we also need to have a focus on using less fuel. If we use 20 gallons less fuel per week, that's the better part of a 100 dollar bill. It doesn't take long for that to add up to substantial savings.
Here are two ways to reduce fuel consumption, and another suggestion for increasing your miles per gallon. I hope you can adopt these to help you save money by using less fuel.
We need to consider opportunities to combine trips in order to make fewer of them. When you combine trips, you use your car for multiple stops, and that provides three distinct advantages. First, your car is warmed up for most of the stops you need to make, so you get better fuel economy even though you are stopping and starting your car frequently.
Second, you can plan your stops so you travel a circuit that makes most efficient use of the distance you travel. Third, and most important, you eliminate trips that otherwise would have duplicated the costs associated with warming up your car and getting to and from the "shopping area." This is where the big savings is, because you're not using gas for all the trips you eliminate.
If you share errands with one or more neighbors, you can save 50% or more of your fuel costs. Here's how. When you run errands for your neighbors, let's say you'd have to drive 50% more miles. When they returned the favor, you wouldn't be driving at all.
A normal errand run might be 50 miles and let's say you do that once a week. That's 150 miles in three weeks. At 50% more cost, that would make your once every three week "cooperative neighborhood errand run" more like 75 miles. My math says that 75 is half of 150, so that's a 50% savings by cooperating with two of your neighbors to help one another get errands accomplished.
The last idea is about increasing your miles per gallon, and it's a little harder to do. It involves changing your hours of work so you can have a smoother commute during less congested times. You'll spend less time behind the wheel, and get better fuel economy as well since you'd spend less time in traffic just idling away your fuel. It isn't available to just anyone, but what would it hurt to ask your employer?
Everyone is painfully aware of the increased cost of getting to work. If shifting your work schedule by an hour would help reduce your fuel consumption, then why not give it a try? The worst that can happen is you'll get people thinking about how they might reduce their fuel consumption too.
Clair Schwan is an expert in frugal living, and has 38 ways to save gas, get better gas mileage and purchase cheaper fuel. See his gas saving ideas and more frugal living tips at http://www.frugal-living-freedom.com