Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Changing Habits: Half-Tank Driving

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I’ve been filling up when the need arises to get gas for about the last two years. But I think that’s going to be changing now. Oddly enough, it all started with a read I had over at the consumerist, a website/blog dedicated to fighting back against bad customer service & making big businesses’ blunders known.


The
article in question was one about how a certain financial pundit said that people who use credit cards are stupid, because they always spend more. The idea was that since you don’t see the money leaving you, you tend to spend more than you would if you paid cash and actually saw the money leaving you.

I could see the point, but I didn’t quite agree. I use plastic all the time, and for us (
me & The Girl) we find that it helps us to spend less money. Because if I have two dollar bills in my pocket, I’m liable to spend them, because after all, “it’s only a buck.” Well you can “only a buck” yourself right into debt, and if I have plastic, well then it’s not just a buck, it’s a buck that’s being tracked, and it’s also a pain in the ass to whip out the card, swipe, and sign, all for a damn Snickers Bar, you know?

The filling-up of the tank, I’m getting to that. But let me finish this tangent I got on here first, OK?

Anyway. I didn’t agree, and a lot of the “evidence” she provided looked good, but some of the comments put up that sort of made me feel better; namely, of course people spend larger lump-sums on a card! Who wants to carry $3,000 CASH to buy that new TV? Nope, you take the AMEX so you don’t get mugged, and you also have chargeback protection! Duh!

Anyway, there WAS a
post that agreed with the premise of the article, and the example used got me thinking. The example was that this guy used plastic to fill the cars. Well if they filled the cars on plastic and they always have a full tank of gas, they never thought of the money that was actually going down the tank and out the tailpipe…

Well regardless I think it was still smart of him to pay with AMEX, and I disagree that paying cash is the X-factor. But it got me thinking just about the wasted gas dollars and that it did apply to me & filling up, and what the X-factor really was. You see, We budget by month. Well if you fill up towards the end of the month, say with 4 days left… you know you’re not filling up against
this month’s budge again, so you floor it when you leave the light. You get ahead of that car. You let it idle longer. You don’t just hit pedestrians that are in the crosswalk in front of you, you gun it and swerve to hit the ones on the sidewalk, too.

But what about when you fill up the day your budget starts? You go slow, you try to conserve the tank and make those dollars in your budget go as far as possible. You don’t make that extra trip. You only aim for older, less-agile pedestrians (still gotta score points though).

So now I’m changing my habits at the pump; instead of filling up when I need gas, I’m going to gas-up in concert with my budget; so filling up isn’t paramount, getting the most out of the bucks is. Because you drive different depending on how much gas you put in.

People with ¼-tank drive much more cautiously and smartly than people with full tanks. So from now on, we’re going to be a half-tank, light-footed Toyota Family. You May want to try this experiment, too.

Peace.

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