If you’re like most people these days, you’ve been scouring your budget line by line looking for anything and everything you can possibly jettison to help pad the family finances and shore up your savings account. It’s a good idea even when the economy is good, but in trying times like these, looking to cut back on non-essential spending is vital to your financial health and peace of mind.
But before you do something drastic like turning off the thermostat or (gasp!) canceling your cable TV to save a few bucks, let me recommend a simpler and less painful way to help you drive up big savings of $150, $200 or more each month.
Before we go forward, I need you to think back to when gas was upwards of $4 a gallon. Whether you had a fuel-sipping economy car or gas-guzzling SUV, remember how every trip to the pump became an agonizing and frustrating exercise in money management? Some drivers experienced it weekly. True road warriors had the unenviable pleasure of filling up every few days. Ouch. After months of high prices, those runs to the gas station finally began to put a pretty big dent in your budget. As for saving money? Heck, you were just trying to get by.
Flash forward to today. Gas prices are in free fall, down a whopping 62% in my area alone. Where once I was dropping close to $80 to fill up my SUV, I’m now gladly paying about $30. Ka-ching…an instant $50 savings!
So what to do with all the coin I’m saving each and every time I’m gassing up? I pretend like gas is still at four bucks a gallon and deposit the difference directly into my savings account.
Here’s how simple it is for me to save $200 a month. I fill up once a week, so I take that $50 I would have otherwise spent on gas and immediately add it into my savings. Before I can say big oil, that $50 I’ve
stashed away quickly piles up to $200 a month – that’s $2400 a year plus any interest I can earn. My wife is onboard with the idea and she adds another $160 to the kitty each month. Together, we can save up to an amazing $4320 a year!
Even if we are conservative and pretend gas is $3 a gallon, we could still realize an annual savings of around $2520 using the same principle, only adjusted for the price difference.
Assuming gas prices stay steady for the foreseeable future (I’m keeping my fingers crossed on this one), she and I have the potential to prop up our savings in a big way. That is unless we spring for the Tivo and HD cable package we just crossed out of our budget.