(Week of 4/27/08 to 5/3/08)
I got lazy this week. I didn’t even go to Winn-Dixie. 
WALGREENS : Softsoap Liquid Hand Wash (x2) / Reg Price $3.99 ea / Paid 64¢ ea
CVS : Chex Mix / Reg Price $1.99 ea / Paid 50¢
WINN DIXIE :Â Didn’t go.
PUBLIX : Cinnamon Toast Crunch (x3) / Reg Price $3.99 ea / Paid $1.50 ea
Here are the details. See the totals log here.
Check out this article over on CNN.
Readers of my blog may remember the economic predictions I made for 2008 and posted back towards the end of last year. I’ve since removed that post and it’s updates because the predictions I’ve made have been embarrassingly and ridiculously wrong. I predicted we would start the month of May with an unemployment rate of 7.2%, the DOW would be at 12,000, a barrel of oil would be $86 and the price of a gallon of gas would be $2.90. The reality is the unemployment rate is only 5%, the DOW is almost 13,000 as I write this, the price of a barrel of oil was over $120 earlier today and the average price of a gallon of gas is $3.61.
But, $5/gal gasoline got me thinking. My daily round trip commute for work is 25 miles. My car averages about 16 MPG (bad, I know; but, it’s paid for). That means I use just about 1.5 gallons of gas to get myself to and from work each day.
And that got me thinking more. Maybe it would be worth it to buy a new, more fuel efficient car. How about a FWD Ford Escape Hybrid that gives me 34 MPG in city driving? That would cut my daily fuel consumption in half (from 1.5 gallons to 0.75 gallons).
At $5/gal, this would save me $72/mo. But, the estimated monthly payment would be somewhere on the order of $500/mo. That means if I wanted to break even (cost of fuel saved equals monthly payment of Escape Hybrid), gas would have to go up to about $35/gal to make that work. Yikes!
