Skip the Car, Ride the Bike

It is quite likely that one of your major expenses is for driving to and from work, thus you can make huge inroads, excuse the pun, to reduce expenses and maximizing your savings here. Take a look at your car loan, your insurance costs, and the (ever increasing) price of gas. These can add up to many hundreds of dollars a month, and that is even excluding any maintenance and potentially costly repairs when your car it’s out of warranty.

What can you do instead? Maybe can you walk to work if you are living relatively close to work, which I hope you are, or perhaps you are in one of the major cities with great public transportation? Perhaps you can at least drive a hybrid to reduce costs. However, one of the best ways to commute to work is to ride a bicycle.

I recently acquired a new bike, and so I should also acknowledge a friend who works at a bike shop letting me buy one of his previous years models at cost, thanks kindly for the savings buddy! Yes, a used bike from craigslist, etc is probably an even better way to go. Anyway, cycling is a fantastic way to get into shape, for free once you have the bike, providing a tremendous side benefit of traveling to work.

I also have to confess that this is perhaps one of my biggest financial lessons that I have had to learn so far. I certainly fell prey to upgrading my lifestyle here with a super nice car back in 2007. I realized my big mistake, and now I thoroughly enjoy my 10-mile each way ride right along the pacific coast to and from work. I now ask myself, why on earth did I not start doing this earlier? The bike ride is so much fun, and it saves me about $10 each day that would be incurred from using the car, due to gas and general wear and tear.