One of the significant expenses that gulp a budget is the work commute cost. Doing rough math, you could spend about USD$2,000 per year on your work commute. This cost is usually overlooked as negligible, but taking a closer, you’d be surprised at how much you actually spend on transportation alone.
Commuting costs can’t be totally eliminated, particularly if you don’t work from home. You obviously need to be able to transport yourself from home to work, and vice versa, every day. However, there are ways you can go about cutting the cost of your work commute before it breaks your account. These include:
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Buy The Right Car
When you’re looking to buy a car for your work commute, don’t just buy a car because it’s fashionable, sleek, or trendy. Instead, look out for vehicles that can conserve fuel efficiently, such as top commuter cars mentioned here. This will help you save on gasoline costs. It will also help take care of little things that could guzzle up your gasoline without you even realizing it.
Other tips that can help you save more fuel include using air conditioners only when necessary, avoiding leaving the windows open, going to work before rush hour so that you won’t get stuck in traffic and expend so much gasoline. But, all these won’t really matter if you buy the wrong car. Thus, get the right vehicle and save yourself some costs!
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Try Carpooling
Carpooling is a system wherein you get to share a car with other people going in the same direction as you. By having more people to travel with, you can share travel and fuel costs, toll fees, etc.
If you have a friend or colleague who works in the same place as you, you could split the driving and cost between the two, or even three, of you. This reduces the weight of what you have to spend, and you also get to ride with company. Cheap and fun!
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Use Public Transport
Going to work through public transportation is an option and is not even a bad idea. Moving by public bus or rail has its advantages. You don’t have to spend money on gas, no need to foot the bill of repairs of tears and damages that may ensue. There are also no car parts that need to be changed regularly.
Some organizations even offer tax-free transportation benefits to their employees. But, assuming yours doesn’t, commuting through public transportation would definitely help you save You also get to enjoy the ride without having to drive. You could even read a book while en route.
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Use A Bicycle
Commuting through a bike is an excellent way of saving transportation costs. Apart from the fact that you don’t have to worry about fuel costs, it could also serve as morning exercise and keep you healthy.
Thankfully, roads are getting more bike-friendly as there are more bicycle lanes and safe routes to ply. You also don’t have to worry about traffic since you have moved from your four wheels to two wheels. Talk about convenience and saving costs at the same time!
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Move Closer To Your Workplace
You can also decide to shift your home location to somewhere closer to your place of work. It will save you the stress and cost of traveling a long distance every working day. If possible, try to get a place that is just a stone’s throw away. A morning walk to the office would definitely eliminate the cost of the work commute.
Conclusion
For a lot of people, the cost of commuting is recurrent and heavy expenditure. No worries as there are ways to cut this cost down to a manageable level, which can surely benefit your finances. The ideas above might sound negligible, extreme, or, probably, a little crazy, but try them out and see how much of your usual work commute spending you’d be able to cut down in 2021. You would definitely be surprised at the results.
