Saving costs too much

I recently put $50 worth of gasoline in my car. I don't have a monster truck or a Hummer or an SUV. And I don't have two gas tanks in my car or some huge vessel that holds enough gas to last four months. I have a small 4-cylinder Mazda hatchback with a gas tank equivalent in size to some pieces of Tupperware.

Fifty bucks for gas for my car is a lot of money for me. I'm using regular unleaded gasoline, not jet fuel. What's the deal?

A couple of bad ideas

So a couple of weeks ago, my wife and I decided to stop driving. Our bank accounts just can't handle these gas prices. We traded in our cars for running shoes, bikes and bus passes. This was a bold move in Southern California, where you must have a car to survive, but boldness is needed during financial times like these, when gas costs $4 a gallon.

My wife and I didn't come to this decision immediately. We first toyed around with the idea of diluting gasoline with water, creating what I called "diet gas" to fill our tanks. When I heard that water ruins engines, I aborted that mission and disposed of the fuel. Drat!

I looked into getting a job at a gas station, hoping I'd get free gas or at least a discount as an employee's perk. No such luck. All I'd get for free was a T-shirt advertising the station's brand of gasoline.

High gas prices make me mad. And I took out my frustration on everyone around me. My 4yearold son was driving his toy car in the backyard, and he parked at his toy gas pump to fill up his tank with imaginary fuel. I became the gas station attendant, and in exchange for the pretend gas, I took all of my son's toys. That's about right, don't you think?

A neighbor asked to borrow some sugar. I charged her $20 a cup. If gas stations can rob people with their prices, why shouldn't I join in the thievery?

Meanwhile, my wife and I were spending way too much money for gas. We were forced to cut our driving in half. We didn't even park at home anymore. We'd walk about six miles from home to a lot where we'd parked our cars, then drive another 12 miles and park them in another lot. Then we'd walk another six miles from there to work.

'Really good' shoes

After a couple of days of that routine, my wife and I needed new shoes. Our feet were covered with big sores. So we invested in some running shoes. According to the salesman at the store, we needed "really good" shoes, or we'd just run into the same foot problems we were experiencing. He told us we also needed special socks. When all was said and done, we'd spent over $400 each to protect our feet.

$1,000 walking clothes

The shoes and socks worked great. But then my wife and I found a need for walking clothes. It wasn't that our colleagues at work told us we stunk, they just avoided us altogether. We took the hint and bought some clothes we could stink up, then change into work clothes when we got to the office.

My wife and I spent more than $1,000 on these running outfits. The saleslady at the store said we needed a specific type of clothing material because (I'm not going to pretend I understood her rationale) of something to do with heat rash.

When a multimarathon champion tells you to buy one kind of clothing over another, you listen. My wife and I listened. The clothes worked great. No heat rashes.

But soon we found we were becoming more and more exhausted and lacked the energy to walk so much and then perform our jobs each day.

Bus passes and energy bars

To give us the energy we needed, we bought economy packs of energy drinks and energy bars, which are a lot more expensive than I'd thought. Those energy products must be pretty high tech formulations to cost so much.

But my wife and I had more energy than we could imagine after consuming them, so much energy that we cut out commuting by car altogether and walked the entire distance from home to work.

When we needed to go to places far, far away, we'd take the bus. And while riding the bus is still cheaper than paying for gas, those bus tickets are also becoming somewhat pricey.

And $1,000 bikes

So to save that cost, my wife and I bought bikes for those long trips. The guy at the store said "cheap" $300 bikes wouldn't last long at all, so he got us to buy the $1,000 bikes.

By the time we were all set up to save money, my wife and I were broke. And the energy drinks and energy bars weren't working anymore.

Before the lady at the store could sell us the next best thing, forcing us to increase our credit card limits, we called it quits. We decided it'd be cheaper to just drive.

E-mail Michael Picarella at michael.picarella@gmail.com. To read more of his stories, visit michaelpicarellacolumn.blogspot.com.