In case you missed it, my goal is to pay for my transmission repair in cash and still have $1000 in savings. I do periodic updates on how I’m doing.

I have been selling items on Ebay and Amazon. I brought in an extra $400 on Ebay. I have allocated $66 of the $316 that has made it to my bank account for savings. The rest will be in my account by Wednesday. I will, no doubt, allocate some of that towards savings when I get it.

Total savings: $421.

Goal minimum: $2700

I am constantly trying to engage the people around me when I ride. If I have time I will stop and talk with walkers. If it’s a driver I make eye contact. Occasionally, I have talked with drivers at red lights (usually about their unique car). If it’s another rider I wave. I’m eternally let down by how apathetic the other riders are. I want it to be like motorcyclists or bus drivers. I want to wave at every cyclist. They - more often than not - don’t even look (that’s another post).

My town, Steelton, is on a steep hill. Like 29% grade in 1/4 mile. I practically need a ladder. I live about a third of the way up the hill. Needless to say, I’m not to the point where I can ride up the whole thing. Especially, first thing in the morning on my way to work. So I do what any serious cyclist would do. I walk it.

Every morning when I make it to the top I get on and ride at the same spot. It is at the end of a driveway. Sometimes I see the family, but have never had the chance to talk with them. This morning I saw the woman who lives there in the driveway. I said, “Shew. I’m usually worn out walking that hill before I even get on my bike!” She laughed. Then we talked for a few minutes about my ride. She couldn’t believe that I chose to ride every day. It was good to finally meet her.

As I rode away I felt good. It was a crisp autumn morning. I had a genuine neighborly conversation. I stopped and watched a large bird I had never seen. I passed the kids in gym class.

I like the different pace of riding my bike. It’s gets me out in the open. I can interact with the things and people around me.

What are some things you enjoy about being in the open on your bike? How do you handle big hills? Are you serious enough that you take them all? Do you notice that other cyclists don’t wave or is that just me?

This weekend I came to visit my friend and her family about fifty miles from my home. She took the train in from Philly to the Harrisburg station. Her dad picked us up and took us the fifty miles to Fairfield.

When I had a car I would have just driven down here anyway in order to have the freedom. Even though the train station is two miles from my house.

But I realized something the other day when a co-worker gave me a ride home from work. The ride from the train station just drove the point home (no pun intended).

Here is an unexpected reward of being carless: the human interaction. Instead of driving in my car alone I am engaging with people.

Shouldn't he be watching the road? He's about to go into a river!

I used get so annoyed when people would turn up their music and say “listen to this” and then play half the song before putting something else on that they wouldn’t let me finish. Instead of talking I ended up listening to about 40 half songs. I am trying to shake that. I am trying to see the music that means so much to them as an extension of their personality. Being in other people’s cars means a lot of other people’s music. What a great chance to get to know people.

I have found that conversation in the car is often better. Some people are not comfortable with eye contact. The car is a good chance for people talk comfortably. I can remember some of my favorite conversations were riding in someone’s car.

Although, this is a double edged sword. There are times when I don’t want to be around people. It hasn’t happened yet, but I am sure there will be days when I don’t want to be in the car with someone.

I am looking forward to the undiscovered music and many great conversations to come.

Do you have any interesting stories about riding in a car with someone? Have you discovered good music from someone playing music in their car? Do you even see being forced to interact with someone as a good thing?

What’s some of the reasoning behind your decisions? I’m especially interested in why you’re splitting [the money you save from going carless] between your credit card and savings. Are you going to pay down your debt entirely in this project? Just credit card debt?

As I’ve mentioned before, I worked hard in the last ten months to get [one of] my credit card[s] from $3200 to $750. I’m proud of this. When the transmission in my car went out I couldn’t stand the idea of putting another $1500-$2500 right back on the card I worked so hard to pay off. As you can see I was attacking my credit cards for months before I decided to go carless. This experiment gives me even more money to play with.

I’m doing a debt snowball. Eventually at the bottom of the hill is my college loan, but first are the credit cards.

So yes, the primary reasons I am going carless are financial. I don’t want to go into further debt, and I want to save the money from not having extraneous automobile costs. The exercise and environmental factor, while important to me, are byproducts.

So that takes care of the reasoning behind the carless experiment as a whole. Now as far as reallocating the saved money? As i stated in my post about insurance I am saving $65/mo. It’s not as much as I originally hoped, but it’s a start. I will split that $65 between savings and paying my credit card debt.

As the reader states in the original question common wisdom is to pay credit card debt first and then save. As it stands, I have a healthy amount budgeted to both. I am currently paying $275/mo towards my credit cards. I am saving $80/mo in a high yield bank account. I will up it to $310/mo for credit cards and saving $110/mo.

Why the credit card/savings split and not put all my resources towards my credit cards the reader asks.

Honestly, this carless experiment is a pointed reason for splitting between credit cards and savings. It is my goal to eventually work up to saving three months living expenses. I want to be able to have the money to do something like fix my car without having to go carless for months. I feel that the $275 (now $310) a month towards credit cards is substantial enough to justify saving as well.

What is your advice? Should I put it all towards credit cards? Is it smart of me to put some in savings now while my credit card debt totals about $5000? What savings/debt reduction ration do you allocate?

If you don’t recall I have decided to keep Frank Sinatra the Elantra (my car). But I figure it will be a few months until I can pay for the transmission repair, so I called my insurance company. I called with the intention of canceling my insurance altogether or, at least, putting it in some kind of freeze. Paula, my agent, told me that I cannot cancel my insurance without sending my tags back to the state. I never knew this before.

No License? OK

“Ok, can I just pay like $20 a month to freeze my account?”

“Unfortunately, there’s not much I can do for you.”

I wanted to say, “are you serious? This is ridiculous” Instead what I said was, “There’s got to be something we can do. Work with me Paula”

She ended up taking off stacking which I didn’t even know I had. Apparently stacking is related to insuring multiple cars. I’m a little upset that I’ve been paying that for years without even knowing. That saved me $95/yr. Since my car is not going to be driven I raised my comprehensive deductible to $1000. I think she said that saved me $150/yr. I would take comprehensive off altogether, but my parents cars were both recently severely damaged in a hail storm. If my dad gets it into his friends garage then I may just take comprehensive off and go with the state minimum.

So, that’s a total savings of about $250/yr or 20/mo on insurance.

My original assumption was that I was able to cancel my insurance altogether bringing my total savings to $160 a month.

A few things have changed.

I am still budgeting $30/mo as “bribe” money (my term for the money that I give people to drive me around). Plus, I will only be saving roughly $20/mo on insurance. That means I will only be saving $65/mo. Still that’s $65 more than I had last month.

Doing an image search to include in this post came up with an image of an ad for “Pay As You Drive” car insurance. Apparently they take strict readings of your odometer. This is a great idea. I think I’m going to look more seriously into it. Do you have pay as you drive? Do you know someone who does?

I will fill you in more about what I’m doing with Frank Sinatra the Elantra in another post.

Map of my ride

I live 2 miles from the two Harrisburg micro-breweries. I can easily get my growlers filled on the bike. It’s still up in the air about how I am going to get cases of beer. I suppose I will have to be more determined about when i get the beer. This is an important one to me.

My girlfriend lives 45 minutes away. She will have to visit me more often or come get me (remember I have “bribe” money budgeted). Her roommate is good friends with my neighbor that lives two doors down. That means I will be getting my rideshare on. Spending time with my girlfriend is obviously more important than beer. Drinking beer while spending time with my girlfriend? Priceless.

My parents live 1 hour away. They will have to drive to visit me. Or I could possibly borrow my girlfriend’s car or have her go with me.

I live 3 miles from the train station. For an extra $5 you can just put your bike right on a rack on the train. So I could ride my bike the the station. Then just get off in whatever city and ride within a reasonable distance. If I go to Philly alone it actually ends up being cheaper with my AAA discount to ride the train than drive.

Harrisburg has a limited bus service. It goes to a lot of places, just not very often. That means I could theoretically ride it to Shippensburg, York, and around town if I needed to. This will help with visiting my parents. Chambersburg is only 11 miles from Shippensburg.

I have a rack and two large shopping bag panniers. They can hold most things within reason. You’d be surprised what you can strap onto a bike rack.

Those are the most common places I go and some other details to help you understand what going carless means to me. As you can see, the distances to the most critical places are not that bad. Everything is under 10 miles and could be under 5 if needed (if I went to the closer and crappier grocery store).

An important point I’m missing is the ability to up an go. Over the last ten years I have driven a lot. I mean a lot. I am used to the freedom of just hopping into my car and driving to wherever I want. So while all the distances are short that does not mean it is necessarily easy for me to go carless. It will be hard when my friend 25 miles away in Carlisle calls for coffee and I can’t go. When it’s midnight and I want to run to Wal-Mart for a project I’m working on is when I will feel the limitations of not having a car.

But I have considered these things. I think in a way it will add to the quality of my life to really consider where and what I do with my time. if it is important to me I will find a way to get there.

The Associated Press

Prices at midstate gasoline pumps have started to fall. Today’s Patriot-News survey of 10 stations in the region put the average price for a gallon of regular unleaded at $3.517, down 14.2 cents from last week.

An average price of $3.51. First, I recognize that Pennsylvania traditionally has some of the lowest fuel prices in the country and that it’s better than $4.00/gallon. Still, don’t be duped into believing that $3.51 is a good price for gas.

I, for one, am glad that I can actually read this article and not care at all about whether the prices are going up or down. I have completely removed “gas” as a line item on my budget and reallocated it into savings. What a liberating feeling.

That is the unexpected reward. While the people around me are rejoicing over $3.51/gallon I am rejoicing over $0.00 00/100 a gallon.

My original plan was to sell what was left of my car and go carless indefinitely. My goal has changed a bit.

I am a personal finance enthusiast. Saving money was actually my first motivation to riding my bike. Now I’ve fallen in love with it for a lot of reasons that may be another post.

The reason I didn’t want to fix my car was because I didn’t want to charge it on my credit card, and I don’t have the cash.

Now the plan is to save enough to pay for the transmission repair with cash and still have $1000 in savings. That way I am still paying down my credit card, saving, fixing my car, and embarking on this experiment for some months. Plus, I expect once I get the money to fix my car I might not be in such a hurry to do it anymore.

I like this because it’s not an endless situation. It gives me a goal. It gives me a reason to be more frugal. It gives you as readers something to root for.

So, my dad says that Hamilton Hyundai will put in a new transmission for $1700 (having this much time might help me find a cheaper place too). I have $355 in savings. I need roughly $2400. Let the experiment commence!

Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of going carless. So being barely a week into this experiment everything seems rosy. This pros and cons list is my naive viewpoint of one just setting off on a journey. I’m sure I’ll revisit this list as the experiment progresses.

First we’ll start with the pros.

Pros:
1. Several hundred dollars for my car (fingers crossed for $1000). I mean the full tank of gas is worth $50 alone! I decided a new plan to get the car fixed with cash.
2. Save $190/mo on gas, insurance, registration. I didn’t even factor in maintenance.
3. Exercise!
4. A slower pace of life

Cons:
1. Limited Mobility
2. Longer time to get where I’m going on bike
3. Purchase winter gear for my bike
4. Becoming the “mooch” without a car
5. Limited Mobility. This is a big one. My parents live fifty miles away and girlfriend is not much closer.

It’s funny how people are different. I consider saving $200/mo and exercising worth the limited mobility. I have given quite a lot of thought to how I will get to certain places, but that is for another post.

Notice in the cons I didn’t put “winter.” I think the winter will be a challenge on my bike, but I wouldn’t consider it a con. I once read, “There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.” I’m keeping that in mind.

Have you gone carless? What’s are the pros and cons for you?

I live in a one room apartment. I do not have a washer and dryer. I’ve been going to the laundromat for seven years (except for one apartment in my early twenties). I like the laundromat because they have four and six loaders. That means I can pile up my laundry real high and then about once every six weeks take it down to the laundromat. Then after three hours it’s all done in one fell swoop.

Well, here is the first of many unforeseen challenges to not having a car: doing the laundry.

Here is my strategy. I have a huge suitcase on wheels. I stuffed it full and strapped the detergent to the extra bag loop on the front. Then I made the half mile walk to the laundromat. It worked like a charm. So far I haven’t had a car for a week and have barely noticed, but winter is coming.