Calculating How Much Driving Costs Me

May 12th, 2008

Volkswagen Polo

I’ve recently been thinking about how much I use my car (a 1.1 litre Fiat Punto), and whether it’s something I can cut down on, and in the process, save money.

One of the problems I have is that I don’t really know how much driving my car costs me. I know the fixed costs, but I think that if I could put a definite cost on each trip, I could then easily see the savings I could make by getting finding a different way to the destination or by cutting out the journey completely.

So I’ve decided to start recording my mileage to work out my car’s miles per gallon (MPG), which will probably turn out to be the main factor in the equation.

To get a more accurate figure, I’ll also take into account insurance, tax and MOT costs (the fixed costs I mentioned above), plus some maintenance costs. Although depreciation is sometimes taken into account in these sort of calculations, that’s not something that particularly bothers me, as I don’t buy my cars expecting to be able to get any money back from then when I get rid of them (although I did have some luck selling my last car on eBay for an amazing £350, when I was expecting to have to pay someone to tow it away). I expect the Punto will be run until it falls apart, which hopefully won’t be too soon.

The first step then is to work out my car’s MPG, which will mean keeping track of how much petrol I pump in at the next fill up, and see how many miles it lasts for. I’ll report back my findings in a couple of weeks, but in the meantime, if you have any thoughts or have tried a similar thing yourself, let us know in the comments below.

Creative Commons License photo credit: gahdjun

Categories: Featured, Money Saving, Tips

3 Comments on “Calculating How Much Driving Costs Me”

Are You Prepared For A Recession? | Money Watch, May 15th, 2008 at 11:06 pm

[...] cover. I’ve also been talking about cutting my car use (of course, I’ll be finding out how much driving costs me [...]

More Worrying About Petrol Price Rises | Money Watch, May 28th, 2008 at 9:23 pm

[...] I’m glad to see that I’m not the only person in the UK stressing about petrol price rises. [...]

Are You Feeling The Crunch? | Money Watch, July 14th, 2008 at 11:22 pm

[...] and ensuring we’re getting the best value for money. I’m (still) trying to work out how much my car costs me to drive, and generally trying to reduce our wasted energy around the [...]

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