With the house purchase coming up, I’ve had to work on my budget a little to make sure I can afford the new payment and not be living paycheck-to-paycheck. One of the major problem areas for my budget is gas. Driving is a zen-like activity for me. There’s nothing more peaceful and relaxing then getting in my car when it’s dark, heading out to the winding country roads away from the city, and just driving. It clears my head and is good fun at the same time. Even without the late-night drives, I tend to go a lot of places. Many of my friends live 50+ miles away in Portland or Beaverton, along with my school and my D&D group (never been able to find a group locally that’s any good). Sometimes I drive home during my lunch, or stop by Target or the grocery store after work. I think part of my problem is that I’ve never really enjoyed being home, and especially not when my home is a 475 square-foot apartment with neighbors who are almost all community college students who can’t stop watching porn with the volume turned way up for everyone to hear.
I’ve never really been one to track my mileage or pay attention to how much I’m paying in gas. I viewed it as a necessary expense that I didn’t really have a choice about, like paying your power bill. You turn on the stove when you need to cook something and you turn the heat up when you’re cold and a blanket just isn’t enough and you don’t really stop to think about how much it’s costing you. You just get the bill at the end of the month and you pay it without questioning the amount. My paradigm for driving is the same. I have to drive, at the very least to transport my son, and driving requires fuel, so it’s not like I could choose to stop buying gas. Nor do I put any significant thought into where I’m going. When I need milk I have to go to the grocery store, and the best way to get there is to drive. I don’t have a choice. However, when I sat down and saw that I was spending $300-$400 in gas per month, I realized the choice wasn’t so black and white. Maybe I could just drive less? There’s a novel idea…
So I’ve set myself a gas budget of $100 per month. At first I thought that was pretty low, but I decided to give it a shot. If I can make it for just one month, then I can increase it a little bit with the knowledge that if I had to, I could make it on less. When I did the calculations at $100, things didn’t seem so bleak. My car can go about 300 miles in the city on a full tank of gas, which can be purchased for roughly $45. So $100 is two tanks of gas, plus a little extra if I need it, which is about 600 miles per month. So in a typical 30-day month, I should be able to drive 20 miles per day. 20 miles! When I saw that I said to myself, “This is going to be easy!” It’s about two miles from my apartment to my job and the one main road that runs between the two has everything I need. So in theory, I should be able to stick to 10 miles per day if I had to. How wrong I was.
It’s the 11th of January and that means that by the end of the day I should have driven no more than 220 miles. Yet my trip meter says that I’ve driven 210 so far this month. A two mile drive home will put that at 212, which is certainly within range of my plan, but not by much. And the worst part is that I didn’t leave home at all on Saturday! Didn’t even step out of my front door for a whole day. That means that I’m driving over 20 miles per day. HOW?! Most days I drive to work and back home. That’s four miles. Sometimes I pick my son up or drop him off at daycare which adds a few more miles, but is still less than 20. I’ve had to take one day this week to go to the house for the inspection, but the house is only half a mile from my work. I haven’t gone to Portland at all, nor have I taken any casual drives. So where the hell am I going?! Do I need to keep some sort of log book, track every single drive I take, and map it out on Google Maps? I think I might have to. I don’t see any other way of getting my driving, and thus my spending, under control. The good news is that I’m still under my goal, but it’s frustrating to believe that you’ve set yourself an easy goal, only to find that it’s extremely difficult.
