Green Panda Treehouse

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Photo Credit:  midorisyu

Over where we live (North Carolina) regular gasoline is $4.04/gallon. Keeping a gasoline spreadsheet can help you keep an eye on your gas budget.

If you’re worried about keeping constant track of everything, don’t worry. You can put information once a week (or every two weeks), if you can keep you receipts. I like giving my husband the receipts as he seems to enjoy it more than I do.

You can see what your actual gasoline expenses are and budget accordingly. See how effective hypermiling can be by tracking the before and after.

If you see a dip in your miles per gallon, it could mean you may have to call your mechanic to check it out. My car’s MPG changed during the move, which I attributed to the change in driving environment (more hills and I wasn’t driving efficiently). When I went to the mechanic, I actually needed a tune up and it is about the same as before now.

Here’s the spreadsheet that my husband created for tracking your gasoline mileage. Feel free to copy and modify to suit your needs. There are some extra tabs, but you don’t have to be as detailed.

What do you to save on gas money and/or keep track of your car? What’s the price of gasoline in your area?

Photo Credit: Jake the Linux Geek

I’m not talking about predicting the future. I’m talking about looking at possible expenses and including it into your budget. I uses to budget and not include things like car repairs. (I don’t really know why, life happens. I guess I lived in hopeful world, where nothing ever needs to be fixed.) When something came up, I scrambled to have money for the repair.

Right now I’m saving up for my timing belt work. I’m going to need it soon, so I’m setting aside some money for it.  I have $200 saved, so $450 to go. The alternative is to wait for it to go bad and possibly ruin my car, which I’m sure would cost me more than $650. Building a doable budget isn’t hard, it just takes time to refine it.

I’m using a ING savings account for the money. By keeping it there, it makes it harder to get it, aka spend it.

I’m still working on the system.This weekend my headlights stopped working. I called my local repair shop and will bring it in today to get diagnosed and repaired. This was unexpected, so I may have to dip into my emergency fund for this, depending on the costs.

Don’t forget to do some easy car maintance work yourself and you can save some money for bigger repairs and maintence work. I had to put some radiator fluid in my car yesterday.

What unexpected repairs have come and ruined your budget? How do you save up for expected expenses?

Photo Credit: Pascal Vuylsteker

We finally got our economic stimulus check yesterday! During my lunch break, I’m depositing into the bank. Once it clears, we’re sending the whole amount $1,200 toward paying down the car loan. I’m excited about it.

My husband is “happy for me”. It’s hard to be excited when he doesn’t exactly see the money, but he knows it’s for a good cause. I love that he’s honest with me. He doesn’t see the immediately see the benefits, but it will help us out as I’ll move the car payments to joint deposits.

By the way, we paid our late rent and fees, so hopefully there should be no problems. We may do the money order option. It just kills me how this situation was handled.

As a reminder to everyone who got their stimulus check this week.

• If you have high interest debt, use the stimulus to pay down or eliminate it.
• If you have no savings, put it in a high interest savings account to start your emergency fund.
• If you have no debt and have savings, looking into depositing the money into an IRA.
• If all of the above is in place, have fun with the money. Actually you could send it to me.

I hope eveyone’s day is going well!