Trim the Fat Tuesday: The In-Town Transportation

Summer is coming, and warm days have finally returned to our neck of the woods. This is the perfect opportunity to save a little money (and enjoy ourselves while doing it!) by

Eliminating in-town drives for six months of the year.

The six months I am proposing are, of course, the snow-free ones: May 1 through October 31. We can count on half of the year here to have reasonable weather for walking and biking, and the whole family has quality rain gear to get through the wet days. In fact, our kids walk to school every single day, in all kinds of weather, so it's only fair that the adults get on board with this too. 

Our town is small, and end to end it's only 8.7 miles, or a 45-minute bike ride:


We live conveniently right in the middle, so no single ride in-town is likely to be more than 20 or 30 minutes anyway. 

So all those baseball practices, piano lessons, and errand runs that are in town? We're walking or biking there for half the year. 

I should mention that, as a teacher, this is all eminently doable during summer vacation — we have a lot of freedom to plan around the weather and our moods when there's no school or work. Your convenience factor may vary. To keep us honest, I am levying a $5 fine when we mess up (due to laziness, rain, whatever). The fine will come out of our entertainment budget, and leave us with less fun money for pizza and ice cream.

Since my car has a very handy built-in calculator that lets you know how much you spent on gas for any given trip, I am able to estimate that the typical round-trip car ride in Newburyport costs between 25 and 50 cents. Assuming an average of 50 cents per day in shuttling kids to and from an activity or making a grocery run, we can multiply that by 30 days per month to find a savings of $15 per month. But since we are only counting on ditching the car for half of the year, the prorated savings are $7.50 per month.

I don't have a calculation for the benefits of fresh air and exercise, but those are some pretty excellent bonuses!

Savings per month: $7.50

Total savings for May: $640 (this month's new savings plus the savings already in place from previous months!)

Total savings in 2014: $1,884

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What to Do With an Unripe Watermelon

Image
Back on the first weekend of August we were so excited to see how big our watermelons were getting. We checked all the signs of ripeness: good sound, firm skin, yellow bottom. So Kirk brought one in: And we sliced it open: Shit. This is not meant to be a yellow watermelon. It only even looks that way in the photo because of the lighting — it's really white throughout. It's Sweet Favorite, and it's supposed to be red.  After the huge wave of disappointment rolled through the room, we all took a bite anyway.  It's not sweet, but it's not sour or bitter, either. It tastes like watermelon, just without the sugar. Kind of like a watermelon-flavored cucumber. It's too big to let go to waste, and we felt obligated to wrap it up and keep it in the fridge until we figured out something to with it.   Dish #1: Watermelon Kachumber Kachumber is an Indian salad that is normally made with cucumber. Here we used some of our unripe w...
Read more

So Where's Everybody From?

Image
I don't have any new garden pictures or updates for you today. I have to say, it's getting kind of hard to get a good photo during the one hour of waning daylight left by the time I get home from work. These are the darkest days now, as we hurtle toward the solstice. Without any photos for me to share with you today, I thought it would be a good time to ask: Where're y'all from? If you have never kept a blog of your own, you might not know that the writer of one gets a bunch of stats about who has hit on the webpage. Most of it's not very interesting: I don't care how many of you use your iPhone vs. a PC or what browser you use to surf the web. The one interesting part, though, is the map . Blogger keeps track of what country readers are in when they check out my page. It's fascinating! Here's my readership map for November: I figured my readers were mostly my Facebook friends, and I know where they are. But now my list of countries is gettin...
Read more

Last Weekend of Winter

Image
It's the last weekend of winter! Next weekend we'll be beyond the equinox, and the days will be ever-so-slightly longer than the nights.  We still have snow on the ground, lots of wind, and temperatures in the 30s, but we plowed ahead with our almost-spring garden chores anyway. Here's what we did this weekend: 1. Got the chickens out on the raised bed where to prep the soil for planting greens: 2. Poked around the greenhouse tunnels to harvest the last veggies: parsnips and a couple leeks, plus a few leftover fall cabbages for the chickens (which they were very  excited about). We do still have some spinach, mache and kale left as well, but not much. 3. Improved the maple sugaring set-up by building a bigger firebox: Kirk used leftover bricks we had lying around to make a floor (so as not to ruin the bricks on our patio), then got nine cinderblocks to make the three walls of the firebox (solid side toward the fire). He also picked up some steel...
Read more