Pound foolish and Prius wise?

[jamarimutt]

Many people in this forum bought a Prius to save on gas, and some go to extremes to get the highest possible mpgs that the car can deliver.

I wonder, what do you do with the money saved? Is anyone out there conciuosly setting aside the savings for a particular purpose? I'm not.

[Ray Moore]

My old vehicle was a Ford F-150 @ 15 MPG. I have saved 1900 dollars so far on fuel and at least 400 on maintainance. I've had the car for less than 10 months. In ten years, I expect fuel and maintainance to completely pay for the purchase price. If the price of gas goes up the timeline shrinks.

Others compare the savings to what you might get from a Corolla or Camry but I would never have thought of buying one of those.

My goal was to get 50 MPG. I felt alot of guilt about burning 1760 gallons of fuel per year. I now consume 500 gallons of fuel and less oil and brakes and no tranny fluid etc.

I'm not setting it aside per se, but I will sort of use it to buy the next car. There are those that are concerned with the cost of replacing a battery. Hell by then the savings will have paid for the whole car.

[john1701a]

Is anyone out there consciously setting aside the savings for a particular purpose?

Yup. I used my Classic Prius money saved to help buy my HSD Prius.

And I'm know of several guys who were first ridiculed by their wife for purchasing a Prius that are now setting aside money to buy a Prius for her.

[hdrygas]

Previous car a Ford Explorer and I am using the money to pay off the car!

[TonyPSchaefer]

Two words: Traditional IRA

[Robert Taylor]

Yup. I used my Classic Prius money saved to help buy my HSD Prius.

And I'm know of several guys who were first ridiculed by their wife for purchasing a Prius that are now setting aside money to buy a Prius for her.

Yup, I got hammered for ordering the exact Prius I wanted after months of attempting to sell the spouse on the merits of the Prius. I went ahead after months of not being able to sell her on it and went ahead and custom ordered the one I wanted anyway.

Got it under three months from the order placement too.

[bookrats]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(TonyPSchaefer\";p=\"65598)</div>

Two words: Traditional IRA
[/b]

Three Words: Off-track betting




:mrgreen:

[jayman]

I'm a systems analyst and systems integrator. As a consultant, I bill my clients mileage, which in Canada is around 44 cents a km. Even in this nasty cold weather, my direct operating costs are around 8 cents a km.

I'm socking away the remainder, as I sure as h*** don't feel like working when I'm a cranky old fart. Guess I'm already cranky though ...

[IsrAmeriPrius]

I wonder, what do you do with the money saved?

Prius car payments.

[daniel]

I find it curious that people consider money not spent on a hypothetical but nonexistent situation (in this case gas not spent on a car you don't have) as money "saved."

Let's see, what am I going to do with the money I saved by buying a Prius instead of a Lear jet? Maybe I should use it to buy a yacht.

On the other hand, saving is always a good plan, and if the mental game of pretending that the absense of a specific expense is a savings helps you to put money in the bank, then more power to you.

Back in the days when I first had a little more money than it cost me to live, I put money in the bank every month as savings toward a new car, so that when the time came I could pay cash and avoid paying interest, and I put an additional sum in the bank every month to go toward house repairs. I accounted for those savings separately from my regular savings and did not think of them as my life savings, but rather as special-needs accounts.

Now that I am more than comfortable I don't have to do that anymore. My income exceeds my expenses so my savings keep increasing in spite of my effots to find things to spend money on. Admittedly, I'm not good at spending money because there's so little I want.

So, no, I don't do anything special with that hypothetical money I "save" on gas by driving a Prius. A quick guesstimate suggests I spent between $300 and $350 on gas my first year in the Prius. Maybe I would have spent $200 more had I kept the Civic. Big deal. (What is a big deal is how much fun this car is to drive, how comfortable it is, how much safer it is due to ABS, Trac, VSC, and air bags, and the cumulative reduction in energy waste and emissions the more people are driving them.)