Home | Automotive

The Best Way to Find the Lowest Gas Prices

There are a few quick and easy ways to lower your gas costs. You can do it without the need to change your driving habits or the need to add anything to your car. The simplest and easiest of these ways is to find the stations that offer 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 price. For some reason most of us were trained to treat gas differently. You probably buy gas where it is convenient regardless of price. The closest gas station to where you live is a likely place for your fill ups regardless of price.

When you run low on gas 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 price than you have to.

A great way to find a station that has the lowest prices is to search the internet. There are a lot of websites that list local gas prices. They list the prices and the locations of the stations where they are found. Here are a few:

GasBuddy.com

Automotive.com

FuelMeUp.com

Utilizing the internet is a great idea because you can research the best gas prices without driving. By not driving, you are not burning gas to find the best prices. If you burn gas to save money on gas you will find it is a self defeating strategy.

The American Automobile Association has done cost studies on operating cars. These studies have determined that it costs about 51.7 cents per mile to operate your car. Based on that 51.7 cent number every three miles you drive searching for low gas prices will cost you $1.50.

If you need to fill your car with 15 gallons of gas you have to realize a savings of about 10 cents for every three miles you drive. If you can locate the best prices for gasoline without driving to find it, you will gain 10 cents per gallon for every three miles in travel you have eliminated.

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 best way to take advantage of the online pricing information you have gathered is to make sure you use it in conjunction with planning your driving activities. For example: if you always pick up your dry cleaning on Tuesday and your information shows one of the lowest priced gas stations is near the cleaners, you should plan in advance to purchase your gas at that station in conjunction with picking up your cleaning. That way you are taking advantage of the low price without any extra driving.

The internet can be a great resource in helping you to lower your fuel costs. If you make sure you utilize the online information along with some smart planning of when and where you fill up, you will start to see a reduction in your fuel costs.

Article Source: http://www.uberarticles.com/articles

Scott Siegel is the author of a 143 page book of automotive industry insider information on saving gas and dollars at the pump (beatthegaspump.com). Visit us to learn how you can get better gas mileage. Find out how to increase gas mileage. Don't reprint this article. Instead, reprint a free unique content version of this same article.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License, which means you may freely reprint it, in its entirety, provided you include the author's resource box along with LIVE VISIBLE links (without "nofollow" tags).