Finance Wanted.

By Scott Siegel

There are several ways to reduce your overall expense of gasoline purchases even before you consider changing your driving habits or taking any actions on your car. The most rudimentary of these is to find the stations that have the lowest prices.

Sounds pretty obvious but for some reason when it comes to gas this elementary behavior is thwarted. If you were buying a camera you would shop around for the store with the lowest cost. For some reason most of us were trained to treat fuel differently. You probably buy gas where it is convenient regardless of cost. The closest gas station to where you live is a likely place for your fill ups regardless of price.

When you run low on fuel and certainly when you think you are going to run out you fill up at the first station you come to. Most likely this station will not have the lowest price. Once again you are buying gas at a higher cost than you have to.

One of the best ways to find a gas station that has the lowest prices is to search online. There are a number of sites that provide information on local fuel costs. Here are a few: Gasbuddy, AAA, fueleconomy.gov and gaspricewatch. You can find more if you just search Google for gas prices.

Finding low prices online is a good idea because you can shop for the best price without driving. In other words, you can find the best gasoline prices without burning fuel to do it.

Studies done by the AAA indicate that it costs on average approximately 51.7 cents per mile to operate your car. So every three miles you drive to find a better price could be costing you $1.50.

That means that if you need to put 15 gallons into your car you have to save about 10 cents for every three miles you drive. If you can find low price fuel by not driving around to find it, for every three miles in travel you have eliminated, you have gained 10 cents per gallon.

This is also important to keep in mind when you find the best prices online. If the best prices are 6 miles away from your closest station, you would have to beat the price of the closest station by 20 cents to break even.

The smartest way to utilize the online pricing information, is to use it to plan your driving activities. If you need to pick up your dry cleaning and one of the lowest priced stations is next to the cleaners, you should plan on filling up at that station when you pick up your cleaning.

The internet can be a great resource for lowering your gas costs. Utilizing the online information in conjunction with advance planning of where and when you will purchase your gas can offer you considerable savings.

Scott Siegel is the author of a 143 page manual of industry insider information on saving gas and money at the pump. Visit us to learn how you can get better gas mileage. Find out how to increase gas mileage.