Save money by carpooling

When you aren't driving, you aren't spending money. If someone else is driving, you may contribute to pay for gas, but you don't have to pay for maintenance, repairs, or depreciation over the life of the car. A carpool can save you hundreds of dollars every year. If you have to commute to work, take children to school on a daily basis, or even go to the grocery store once a week, a carpool can save you transportation expenses which you can put directly into your cash reserve.

The average commute for people over the age of sixteen working outside the home is around twenty-five miles one way. That's fifty miles of driving in one day. The average price of gas countrywide as of April 1, 2009 was $2.15 per gallon. With a daily fifty-mile commute in an economy car that gets twenty-five miles to the gallon, you are spending $4.30 per day on gas just to get to work and back. If you work five days a week, you are spending on at least $21.50 per week and $86 per month. That price doesn't include running errands around town or visiting friends or entertainment venues on the weekends. If you carpool with one person, you can split the cost of gas down the middle, which gives you $10.75 per week you could put into your cash reserve. That means you are saving $43 per month, and at least $516 per year that goes into your cash reserve. If you carpool with two other people to work and back, your part of the gas price goes down, which means you'll save $14.33 per week and $57.33 per month. By the end of the year you could put away a lot more in your cash reserve.

The school bus transportation system was the forerunner of carpool and still serves a great purpose today saving people money by taking their kids to school for them. However, with the rise in popularity of pre-school, charter schools, and private schools, more and more mother are finding that they are the bus service, not to mention all the moms who drive their kids to school because they aren't apart of the bus system. The average commute to a school is about ten miles. With the average price of gas and an economy car, that means you are spending around $1.72 per day and $8.60 per week driving your children to school. You could save yourself $4.30 a week if you and your kids set up a car pool with a neighbor. That would give you $17.20 a month at least to put into your cash reserve.

Carpooling also saves you ware and tare on your vehicle. When you drive your car less often, you don't have to change the oil, rotate the tires, or check the mechanical systems nearly as often. If you drive half the time and someone else drives half the time, regardless of where you are going, you can put the cost of maintenance in your cash reserve every time you take your car in for the dealer recommended oil change because you only have to take it in half as often as you would if you weren't carpooling. Dealer recommended maintenance normally costs around $375 every 30,000 miles. If you would normally drive 60,000 miles in five years, carpooling saves you half the mileage, which means your car would only have one 30,000 mile check-up in five years rather than two check-ups, which give you $375 to put away in your cash reserve.