It"s a Crazy Wonderful Life

This is a blog about my family and the crazy life in the Sims Household. We have 5 children, ranging from 14 to 5, and seem to be going in all different directions sometimes. The purpose of this blog is to help keep our friends and family up to date on what is going on in our lives.

Sunday, May 25, 2008

Fighting Back Against High Gas Prices

We have definitely been feeling the crunch as gas prices continue to climb. As I am sure you all have too. We decided to fight back as much as we can and we did something drastic yesterday.

Here is a bit of background to help you understand our decision. I have been driving a Suburban for the last 5 years. My gas mileage is about 10 MPG in town and about 15 MPG on the highway. For the last year or so, I have not been able to fill up my gas tank for less than $100 and lately it has been about $135. You may or may not know that most gas stations have a cap of $100. So when I fill up the pump automatically shuts off at $100, then I have to swipe my card and go through the process all over again to fill my vehicle. It is kind of a pain, but oh well. I can go about 10 days on a tank of gas and most of my driving is in town. I rarely go on the freeway, so you can see where I am going here. I have felt like I was throwing money away by driving my big truck. Often I have just 1-2 kids with me, making the large vehicle unnecessary.

A year ago when Mike needed to buy a vehicle for work. He choose a really nice Nissan Pathfinder. Now he has been driving an average of about 600 miles a month at about 15 MPG. Our overall gas bill has been about $800 per month. CRAZY!!!

So for the past few months we have been considering the possibility of buying an extra car. Something smaller and more economical for me to drive around town in. That idea slowly evolved into the idea of trading Mike's Pathfinder and getting two new cars that get better gas mileage.

The last two weekends have been spent exploring our options and the days in between have been spent on the internet investigating those options. We made spreadsheets to compare the costs of the vehicles and the fuel efficiency and how all these factors related to and would help our budget.
Our work came to a conclusion yesterday when we turned this...


into these.

This is Mike's new car. It is a sporty Nissan Altima Coupe. It will more than double his MPG. It will be an adjustment from his Pathfinder, but he likes it.

This is my new car. It is a Nissan Sentra. I LOVE it!!! It will be a lot more fun to drive than my suburban. We will keep the suburban for a family vehicle, and we will use it when we all go places together and for camping and vacations.

Amazingly, even with buying 2 cars, we will still be saving money in our overall budget. When you consider Mike's old car payment and our gas bill before, and the payments on both new cars and gas, we will be saving some money every month. And as gas prices go up, that savings will only increase because of the fuel efficient vehicles.

1 comment:

Nigel Flannery Livingston said...

You've done a great thing to help further the cause. So many people don't care. They complain about gas prices, and complain about the war, but they refuse to give up their big trucks.

This sounds so condescending, but I didn't mean it that way.

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