HEY EVERYONE!! Have I got a cash and gas saving tip for you that will make the oil industry curdle in anger!!! This, folks, is the carbon-neutralizing, tight-dollar secret that Conoco, Philips and Gore do not want you to hear. No, the answer is not hydrogen, it isn't bio-fuel, it definitely isn't Ethanol... Prepare to have your socks blown right off!

 

   The key to winning the war against skyrocketing gas prices, air pollution and costly corn-flakes is this: A "To Do" list! With the power of the "To Do" list, you can do many of the following, possibly in the same trip, once a week! You will be able to:

   And what better time to do all these than right after the work-day is complete? You are in the neighborhood, so you might as well!

 

   In all seriousness, though, is it really necessary to be making two or three trips a day to pick up only a couple things at a time? It only seems to be the typical consumerist nature in our current "I need it now" culture to just up and hop in the car at moments notice with no real plan of action, except for the fact that they need one item or have one agenda to complete. I don't know how or when this happened, but I feel too often, gas becomes some sort of mystical energy that powers your car. "Well it's a necessity," seems to over rule any and all logical rationing of how you are utilising the seven gallons of gas left in your car. Do you have a plan for the $24.50 in your gas tank or does the 'necessity' reasoning over rule?

 

   Look at it like this. Say you are sitting at home and you decide you want to pick up a sandwich at Subway for $3.00. You live four miles away and you own a car that gets ~23 miles to the gallon. you paid $3.19 a gallon for gas. In order to get a Spicy Italian sandwich for $2.99 + tax, you are going to end up spending at least $1.10 round trip in gas if there is no traffic or complications. For a grand total for the sandwich alone, you just paid around $4.30.

 

   On the flip-side, say you had the foresight to be able to say, "Hey, I am probably going to want a tasty sandwich in the next week." and chose to buy the materials needed to make the sandwich while you were picking up other food and necessities at the local grocery store. You would most indeed not have $1.10 in gas tied exclusively to a sandwich purchase (unless if you only eat sandwiches, in which case, more power to you). Now I doubt on most occasion you are going to drive more than one mile to eat every meal. However, if you take into account that people generally eat both lunch and supper around 350 - 365 days a year. This is over 700 meals a year per person. A lot of eating and a lot of driving if you don't plan accordingly.

 

In the end, this is all really just speculation, but if you run the numbers on your own trips you make, you'd be suprised exactly how much gas and money you consume in a week. So with that said, it isn't necessarily just the big companies faults that buying a tank of gas feels like a burden, it is also our own if we don't watch how we manage it.