You know how the auto fill on the gas pump clicks off automatically, but you can always squeeze in an extra buck or two? Yesterday I squeezed in an extra $7, and probably could've run it to $10 if I really wanted to.
I'm just "happy" when I find a station where I can fully fill up. Some stations cap you at $95 which is about 3/4 tank. Since my business pays for my gas, I can track how much I spend by looking at my P&L's and holy shit has it gone up. It usually is in the low $300's but now in the mid $500's
The car and truck, by far. We still use relatively little gas in the boat. But at $5+ a gallon it doesn't take much to add up to big dollars
Not to pick on you specifically but this strikes me as an absurd combination of car + commute. Even at elevated prices, that's 3 gallons of gas, which for a sane car/commute could last you weeks. It really highlights how inefficiently we've structured our system that so much gas is needed to get to a place most of the world can walk to.
It is actually 4 gallons of gas to make the round trip to his school, twice a day. I spoke about buying a Grom a while back, but I actually do so little driving alone or in situations where it would be practical, it really would not be worth it. Wife won't let the kid ride on the back. If it weren't for that school drop off and pick up, it really wouldn't be that big a deal. I could get away with going to town once a week, or less. It's that twice daily trip that kills me. It will get even worse as he ages, the middle school is a little farther away, the high school is much farther away. I don't know what the bus situation will be like for those two schools, likely the same.
I'm glad I live in the sticks now and I don't have to sit in traffic anymore. Daycare is about 4 miles away, Dunks is about 2. After that, I have nowhere to go. If I have to go to the city, the train comes right through my town. The last time I filled up my Jeep it cost $95 and that was two weeks ago.
You do not live in the sticks like I live in the sticks, City Boy. Only thing within four miles of us is neighbors and two stop signs. No gas station, no food, no nothing. Luckily I can do a lot of things to make money without leaving the house. Freelance drafting, solar array design for residential houses, fix boats that people bring me. It's that damn trip to school that kills us.
Mom lives in the sticks way better than you, too. Only thing within 4 miles of them is a General Store that was in the movie Cabin Fever. It was meant to be a foreshadowing representation of how far into hillbilly territory the characters were.
Driving across the country (well, Ontario to the West Coast), I’ve spent anywhere from $2.70 to $1.68 a litre for diesel. It’s insane.
$98 hold is crazy because if that hold doesn't release, you could be looking at $200 sitting there on your card while you wait for the hold to drop off. Even worse if you're doing a big trip where you need to fill two or three times. Not everyone has that kind of room on their cards!
Just pay in cash. I have never had a problem filling up a 25 gallon tank on my pickup with $6.00 gasoline. As a matter of fact I get a 10 cent reduction on the gas for paying with cash.
Saw a story that a gas station in Mendocino had gas for $9.50 a gallon. Jesus. Californians are gonna have to figure out things to talk about other than what roads to take to get places.
Hopefully that topic will be "do you think it was a mistake to think we could build a suburb of 10 million people?"
While, in some ways, I wish we had waited and saved up more cash for when we bought our house, I'm really glad we got in when we did. Our rate wound up being around 2.8 and houses similar to ours have been going for about 40-50k more nowadays. Crazy.