If you’ve stopped at a gas station lately, you might have been shocked to see the price on the big signs. Even if your gas station charges a different amount for credit card users than for cash customers, sometimes called a “cash discount” even though it’s the cash price that’s competitive with other stations, the lowest prices are higher than ever.

According to AAA, the average gas price across the country is now $3.76 per gallon. It’s not a record, but it’s getting close. Blame it on Obama, Bush, Iran, or Saudi Arabia; it doesn’t change the situation. The best we can do as consumers is to do our best to reduce our reliance on gasoline for transportation.

Here are a few tips for saving money on gas.

• Use technology to save money. Smartphone apps can tell you the locations of the gas stations with the best prices along your path. With this information, you don’t need to drive out of your way, wasting fuel, to get to those low-cost stations.
• Use the best gas rewards credit cards. If your spending is in check, use credit cards that offer the best rewards for fueling your vehicles. If you can get 5% on your gas spending, you could have an advantage over people paying cash, but you’ll have to compare that option with the stations that offer a cash discount.
• Maintain your car properly. Use a trusted mechanic, watch the performance of your tires, and keep your car clean and empty. Small changes in your tires and vehicle weight can affect your gas-mileage, so keep your car running efficiently.
• Travel less. Work from home more often. If you’re shopping for a new job, consider mass transportation or car-pool options. In the last year, since working from home, I still drove 10,000 miles. That’s down from 14,000 miles over the prior year. The year before that, I drove 15,000 miles.
• Consider a more efficient vehicle. While I generally don’t consider it a good idea to replace a perfectly functioning car just for efficiency, if you’re shopping for a new car, it may be worthwhile to buy something partially powered by electricity. This isn’t the best plan for all drivers, and the cost vs. benefit calculation often takes a while for the increased cost of these vehicles to break even through savings on gas.
• Plan your trips efficiently. If you can combine your errands requiring transportation rather than venturing out several times each week, you can save gasoline and money. Plan your routes in a way that reduce the total number of miles driven rather than retracing your path.
• Use an investing strategy to hedge against gasoline price increases. It may seem counter-intuitive when your plan is to reduce reliance on gasoline, but by investing in the oil industry, you benefit when companies profit from higher gas prices. If, however, companies don’t increase their profit with higher prices, then you’re stuck paying for higher gas without a strong investment to compensate.

About a year ago, I asked if Consumerism Commentary readers were ready for gas prices of $5.00. That level as an average is starting to look like a reality for the near future. While some commentators often remind Americans that people in other current countries often pay much more per gallon than those of us lucky to live in the United States, it’s not exactly a comfort to people who have built their lives around the ease of transportation.

What are your tips for saving money on gas?

Photo: crowt59

{ 29 comments }

As more consumers in the United States are jumping on the smartphone and tablet bandwagon — personally, I contribute to this mess with one of the latest phones with Android software as well as a first-generation iPad — there’s less room in the limited airwaves for customers’ needs to access the internet and occasionally make telephone calls over mobile networks. Mobile carriers are doing what they can to preserve what remains of the spectrum, usually by increasing prices or limiting bandwidth.

The idea behind the peak oil movement is that in the future — and sometime soon — the world will not be able to efficiently produce as much oil as the citizens of the world need to consume, and due to the imbalance between supply and demand, prices for oil (and thus everything else that relies on oil) will skyrocket. Peak oil has been proven difficult to predict.

Unlike peak oil, wireless carriers know how much spectrum they have left before they can’t support any additional traffic over the air. The situation is similar to real estate. There’s only so much available land for construction, and as the available land in any area with adequate demand is sold, the pressure of the lack of supply drives prices up. Dish Network, for example, has a significant amount of unused spectrum, and it would like to sell what it isn’t using to a wireless provider that desperately needs the spectrum to satisfy its customers.

As companies need to devote more of their resources towards increasing spectrum — whether through consolidation attempts in the industry like AT&T’s purchase of T-Mobile — or through buying spectrum from other owners at a high price — and as companies use pricing to limit customers’ use of the spectrum, the cost for a family or an individual to receive the same level of service is going to increase.

Save money on your cell phone bills

You can keep your cell phone bills in check:

• Use a service like Validas to make sure you’re paying for the best mobile plan for you.
• Compare prices across carriers. Don’t just consider the mainstream plans with the major carriers; pre-paid mobile phone plans could cost less.
• Consider skipping internet-enabled devices. If all you need to do is talk, you can save yourself the expense of the latest high-tech phones and stay on a less expensive voice plan.
• If you have other telecommunication services, like cable television and home phone, consider bundling these services to save money.
• Call and ask for a discount. Sometimes, you can get a price break just by asking. Don’t threaten to leave, though, unless you’re willing to live up to that promise.

I’m currently paying over $100 per month for my mobile phone service with Verizon Wireless, which includes my phone with 4G smartphone service as well as a 3G service for my iPad through a separate device. How much do you pay for your mobile phone service? Are you prepared for this cost to increase in the next year or two as companies fight over remaining broadband spectrum?

Photo: @iannnnn
CNN Money

{ 16 comments }