mrog71

I figured out how I can buy a new bike for free! (at least it's free in my own little twisted mind..)

A friend of mine suggested this to me yesterday. I just started bike-commuting to work last week. I've been keeping track of all my riding miles on bikejournal.com. I'm going to aggregate my commuting miles, and every time my commuting miles adds up to the distance I can go on 1 tank of gas in my car, I'm going to put 1 tank of gas worth of money aside. i.e. - My car will go about 300 miles 1 full tank of gas, and a full tank of gas costs about 20-25 dollars right now. So, every 300 miles of commuting, i set aside $23 dollars toward my new bike! After a while, I'll have enough for the new bike, and it'll basically be free, since I would not have had the money if I had still been driving to work! WooHoo!!

pj7

You can also deduct the costs of regularly scheduled maintenence on the auto since you'll be driving it less.
And possibly a gym membership, assuming you, like so many of us, have always wanted to get one but never did. Now you have a reson to stay out of the gym and put that $30.00/mo aside for your bike/gear

mrog71

I wish I could do that, but I have to have the gym to shower before work. There is no shower at my place of work, but my gym is only 1/4 mile away, so I stop at the gym to shower and change (and sometimes workout) before cycling the last 1/4 mile to work. Good idea about the expenses though! I'll add that in!

DogBoy

If you want to go crazy with the accounting, (and get the new bike sooner ) then I suggest you also add the depreciation of your vehicle over its useful life. So if you have a brand new vehicle that cost 25k and you plan to keep it for 150,000 miles with a 3,000 residual value, you can tack on another (25-3)/150 = .146 per mile ($44 per 300 miles). If you bought a used car just use (price paid - residual value) / (miles when sold - miles when purchased).

You aren't really saving this money since cars depreciate more based on time than mileage, but hey, you will get your "free" bike sooner!

EnigManiac

I have used a similar formula to justify all the bikes I have bought: I use public transit for commuting during the worst of winter (mid-December-early March) and rather than buy a monthly pass at $98.00, I buy tokens (10 for $20.00). If I am able to ride during those months, the tokens will last longer, but if I am not, then I have spent $100.00 for the month. About nine months of the year I can ride and, therefore save about $900.00 per year (approx., depending on weather). Taking into account that I would drop my insurance down to basic for 6 months of the year, that saved me another $700.00 per year and with no gas or maintenance during that period, another $600.00 savings was realized. I have since sold the car and no longer have any of the associated expenses. But, when I had the car I was saving about $2,200.00+ per year by riding the vast majority of the time. You know how many bikes you can buy with $2,200.00? I did that for 5 years. That's $11,000.00 I saved! Now, with only occassional cabs and infrequent car-rentals, it works out to what I used to spend on insurance alone. I have only spent about $3,000.00 on four bicycles during that period plus about $1,000 in accessories, so I am ahead of the game by $7,000.00 during that time.

I keep my gym membership because it is through work and only costs $10.00 a month and allows me to use all their facilities including shower, sauna and jacuzzi. It's worth it.

DCCommuter

I think that's a great idea. When my kids are a little older, I plan to pay them $0.10 or $0.25 a mile for every mile they ride their bikes and I don't have to chauffeur them around.

It's been debated to death here, but the real savings pile up when you can eliminate a car altogether. The lion's share of the expense of operating a car is fixed -- costs like insurance, depreciation and registration don't vary appreciably with mileage.

Of course, cycling is its own reward. The financial benefits are icing on the cake!

super-douper

my wife and I share 1 car. She drives to work, I cycle. We've done this for years so I can't really count my cycling as savings anymore...maybe cost avoidance. We've just moved farther from work, 15miles one way for me now. The options were 1) bike farther 2) bus 3) buy car. I chose the best option which was to ride. Not the fastest, not the cheapest option (My employer pays for a pass to ride the bus and light rail for free, so I wouldn't have to pay to take a bus. The bike costs me for maintence and clothing and such) but definately the best.

I don't consider it savings anymore, but I do realize how much less it costs for me to ride instead of purchase a second car. If I only counted insurance on the 2nd car I could probably buy a new bike every 1.5yrs with that money. Then there'd still be maintence and gas savings on top of that.

We moved closer to my wife's work, so her car commute is shorter, so there will be a savings in gas there, maybe about 25% reduction in gas costs but it's hard to convert that into dollars when the prices of gas are moving so frequently.

Like DCCommuter, I consider the cycling the best part. Financial and environmental benefits are the icing on the cake for me.

Justify it however you like, if you stick to bike commuting you won't be sorry!

JugglerDave

I spent *hours* when I first started riding, trying to figure out how much "cost avoidance" or savings I was doing by riding instead of driving. It was somewhat easy to find the "per mile" cost of the car based on 12,000 miles per year (e.g. 40 cents per mile). It was a little harder to find the "extra mile" cost of driving an extra mile in a given year (17-25 cents). It was very hard to find the amount of SAVINGS by not driving some miles in a year; it all came down to whether you replace a car every X miles or every Y years, how much more is your car worth with 10K fewer miles on it, the "cost of money" by having to buy a car X weeks earlier, etc.

Then, of course, the cost of riding. How long will a bike last, what is the maintenance costs, clothing, "fuel" (e.g. eating a $1.29 Powerbar in a 32 mile ride).

Long story short (for me). Unless you're avoiding having to have a 1st or 2nd car, or your biking cuts down on 50%+ of the miles per year, it seemed to be a wash dollar-wise. But you can always play with the numbers and justify anything (e.g. to convince the spouse that you should be able to buy a new "free" bike).

-=$>Dave<$=-

mrog71

Well, to be honest, that's really the whole point of this excercise. I don't need to justify it to myself!!

discosaurus

I've started a bike savings as well. For every 300 miles on the bike, I drop $20 in savings. Each week I drop $5 in savings for the pack of cigarettes I no longer buy. Works for me!