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Just wondering how many of us are making changes, subtle or major, to our lifestyle due to the higher oil prices?

I drive 50 miles daily roundtrip to my office, then often have to travel for business during the day (the IRS-approved mileage allowance doesn't help much), and, to add insult to injury, I heat my home with oil. Luckily I have a rather small Cape Cod style home, but at $3.50/gallon it is still expensive.

I do find myself trying to consolidate stops into one trip when I go shopping, have postponed some planned work around the house, and even have cut back just a bit on dining out.

Anybody else?????

I take the train to work. I've had my car 9 years and it has 36,000 miles on it. A tank of gas usually lasts me at least 3 weeks.

Yes

Although my commute is a short one,
driving for pure pleasure is one of my favorite things in life.
Back in the '90's, I'd usually log 20 to 25,000 miles annually.

You learn so much when you travel the country, meeting so many others.
It is a unique priviledge that MOST other citizens of the world simply do not have access to.

It is hard to accept that the rising prices are a certain fact of the future.
Oil is not running low. It's the refinement of crude that is in shorter capability, (no new refineries in nearly 30 years?!)
and without any pressure from our current "leader", or his political party cronies,
there is no motivation for free-market oil companies to invest in refineries that would only cut into their RECORD profits.

It's really something to experience a President that cares a LOT more about his FAT-CAT friends than YOU or ME!

Gas is getting more expensive. In the spring I will be purchasing a Lotus Elise or a BMW Z4 to get better gas mileage than my 15MPG SUV. Hopefully with the money saved there I will be able to continue my Private Pilot training. Have you seen the price of 100LL lately?

I don't have a choice unfortunately, there's no public commute available for me from any of the places I have to commute too.

But during the weekends I stay closer to home.

LIPH wrote:I take the train to work. I've had my car 9 years and it has 36,000 miles on it. A tank of gas usually lasts me at least 3 weeks.

My husband "slugs" to work everyday.....for the past 5 years. So his car has low mileage and a tank of gas lasts a long time. I have to drive because of where my job is located....I have almost 80,000 miles on a 5 yr old car and use at least a tank of gas a week. Which means about $200 a month in gas.

All the gas stations here sell gasoline with the ethynol blend in addition to regular gasoline.
The gas with the ethynol is 10 cents per gallon cheaper than regular (right now that's about $2.93 per gallon), but I WILL NOT put that crap in my car, Iowa farmers be damned!
It's bad enough gasoline prices are rising, there's no way on God's earth I want to contribute to rising corn/farm prices as well.

As far as the question of "Am I changing my lifestyle" due to rising gas prices-not really.
It's mostly to & from work, and maybe a couple trips a week to Cedar Rapids (27 miles away) to see my parents. I make extra trips there whenever there's a parrothead event or meeting going on there.
I still make my usual 4-5 road trips per year (including one this past weekend to the Quad Cities to see T.C. Mitchell).
The closest grocery store is about 12 miles away, which I pass by going to and from work, so I always do whatever grocery shopping needs to be done on the way home from work.
I do a few little extra things that help with buying and saving gas too. I work whatever overtime is available (which helps pay for other things), I redeem empty beer & coke cans/bottles at the recyling building at the grocery store, which also has it's own gas station, and I use the coupons from the bottles toward the purchase of gas-that means if I turn in 20 empty cans or bottles, I save $1.00 on a tank of gas-30 empties saves me $1.50, etc. and as much beer and diet coke/diet pepsi/root beer, etc. as my wife & I drink, we end up saving quite a bit.
Of course, there's things we can all do as well to help save gas-
keep the tires properly inflated,
keep the car tuned up,
don't drive at excessive speeds,
combine trips,
car pool whenever feasible,
and (my favorite) SHOOT all the environmentalist kooks and drill for oil in THIS country, build more refineries and nuclear plants.

I pay $178/month for my train ticket but it would cost me a lot more if I drove, plus the extra time and aggravation of sitting in traffic. It's 35 minutes from my station on LI to Penn Station. If I drove it would take more than an hour, the toll on the Midtown Tunnel is $4 each way and when I got here I would have to pay to park the car in midtown.

we've definitely made adjustments. have parked our minivan in the garage and bought a small car that gets pretty decent gas mileage this weekend. Mr Freaky estimates that we'll pay $100 less in gas each month. the grocery store is very close and we try not to go anywhere on the weekends.

the thing that REALLY angers me is that Exxon recorded it's HIGHEST PROFIT EVER LAST YEAR.


rat ba$tards.

Maybe we all need to plan out a new "strategery"

I'm in sales.....i travel anywhere between 80-250 miles daily.....aprrox 2500-3000 miles a month.....our company gives us so much a year....7200.00....out of that comes my cell phone...car insurance....car payment and oil changes or repairs!!!....so not much left for gas.....it cost me out of my pocket a month about 220.00....so yes it has killed me.....i started with this company when gas was 1.50....it's doubled plus!!!...had to vent...touchy subject for me.....where do i cut back...less Golf....no dates( can't find one anyways)....less Travel....and i will have to go for the cheaper lawn seats a few times for Buffett shows!!

Nope

A similar topic came up sometime last year. I'll say the same thing now that I said back then. If we poured as much money into developing mass transit systems as we do into building highways and trying to pave over the whole country we wouldn't have this problem.

Mass transit isn't an option in Rural BFE.

We've cut back on driving out of the Valley for stuff. The only local store is Walmart, and a grocery store or two, so we'd take 2-3 hour drives out of the Valley to buy things that just aren't available here. We'd go probably every other month or so, but we only go when necessary now.

I'm not letting it change my lifestyle. Still gonna do what I want to do.

LIPH wrote:A similar topic came up sometime last year. I'll say the same thing now that I said back then. If we poured as much money into developing mass transit systems as we do into building highways and trying to pave over the whole country we wouldn't have this problem.

the industry knows we're not going to change and that's how they can get away with charging us out the a$$. we're addicted.

Sold one of my Mini Van's and bought a Toyota Yaris.
In the month I have had it I have saved more in gas vs. the van than my monthly payment. $250 vs. $220.
Last year I drove my Firebird Convertible a total of 1800 miles due to the $3.00 price of gas. It is only driven from May to the end of Sept.
Also, I had to Van's and the convertible and the one that got the best mileage was ? The Convertible. A sports car with good mileage. Who would have thought.

Later

The cost of gas hasn't changed our lives... other than reaffirming to us that we need an alternative source or renewable feul.
My husband's sales job has him on the road an average of 1000 miles a week -- a job requiring the use of an SUV! (Keep in mind, he's a Canadian and used to paying higher gas prices.) Fortunately, my job (SAHM) takes me to school and the the local stores, so I'm the balancing factor in this family.

Driving, now. Not much I could change with that. But I have home heating oil and up here it is at 3.09 a gallon (on my last delivery) so now I keep the home temp a few degrees cooler than I used to. When I am not home I keep the heat off unless it is really cold out. I have a dog but he has fur.

The last time this topic came up, someone here (I forget who) mentioned that it's so ironic that, while we complain about high gas prices, we still have our six HDTV's throughout the house, iPODs, and we continue to buy bottled water by the truck load.
Perhaps we all have some mis-directed priorities?

My only options are to pay whatever the price is, or don't drive. And not driving is NOT an option for me. Yeah, the price is high, but I'm not about to walk 15 miles one way to work.
ANOTHER option that's available to me is to move within the city limits of Iowa City, then I could have a "company car" to drive (as long as it doesn't leave the city limits). But what I'd save in gas doesn't come anywhere NEAR what I'd pay in property taxes. (The woes of living in a University town).

Also, what most people won't admit, is there are SIMPLE ways to get the price to go down, but nobody even wants to bring those options up for discussion.
Which means we all pay higher prices for gas.