The $30.01 in 30 Days Gas Challenge

Hello all, I have been off the radar for awhile as I hurt my neck and sitting in front of a PC  has been painful especially after a day of sitting in front of TWO computers.

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I challenged myself to see if I could stretch $30 worth of gas into 30 days. Thanks to my crackerjack gas pumping skills I ended up spending an extra penny.

Now I know what you are thinking. Jo you are single, without children, living in the city, near work and services. I can’t do that. Don’t worry I did not ask you to. This is my challenge.

So the goal was to see if I could use other means to get around besides the car.

Why? Well why not? When I first started writing this I thought okay this can be a post about some sort zen, becoming closer to nature story how I gave up the big bad oil sucking combustible engine and zipped around town on my bike and found inner peace and happiness.

Nah. It was just me being cheap!

So here are the numbers:

I drive a (paid for) 2005 Toyota Echo hatchback.
$30.01 bought me about 23L of gas.
I drove 287.4 km but I probably could have rounded that up to 290km but I did not want to test that theory and run out of gas in the middle of a torrential downpour.

Most of my 287.4km were a few trips to the grocery store, and some family events. I did not want to show up to said events all sweaty and gross.  One day I could have biked to work but I was dead tired when I woke up so I drove. All in all, I think I drove to work 5 times in the month.

So what did I learn from this challenge?

1. My car gets awesome mileage.
2. I saved about $30-$35 doing this project.
3. It was pretty easy.  I sometimes thought, oh, getting on my bike and biking to destination X would be hard and tiring or there might be wind, blah blah blah but really it was not that hard. Somehow, I had convinced myself it would be hard. Ultimately, I had to convince myself it would be easy.
4. My fitness improve with each trip.
5. It forced me to NOT be lazy. There were plenty of times where I could have just got in the car and if later on I ran low on gas, I could have zipped into the gas station and added another $10 or $15. Having a ration of gas made me think carefully about each and every trip. I decided to skip the under 5km trip in the car and do it in the bike. This is good cause I hate lazy. I hate it when I’m lazy and I dislike lazy people.

So in the end, I rode around town and it was pretty fun. I think I will keep doing it until it gets too cold.

Next challenge, the $100 cell phone bill. That may sound pretty easy, except for me it’s going to be $100 for the whole YEAR. Details on 30 May 2013.