I find myself constantly reaching for a calculator to crunch the numbers on how much it actually costs to drive to work and back. Weekends, I’m in Manila with my family; weekdays, I’m up in Clark, a good hundred-plus kilometers away.
Right now, with gas prices and tolls where they are, the commute runs me about two thousand pesos a week. Just a month ago, it was five or six hundred pesos less—that’s the price of a big can of my son’s milk. What about next month? Do we tack on another five or six hundred? That’s another can gone. Talk about spilled milk. And a few months down the line? I don’t even want to imagine.
No wonder I find myself drooling over those hybrids that can stretch fifty kilometers to a liter. My trusty Innova manages a little over eleven, already top of its class for efficiency. Go Innova! 🙂 But still, compared to a hybrid, it’s like bringing a slingshot to a gunfight.
At least I’ve learned a few fuel-saving tricks thanks to the internet and driver’s ed guides. And, believe it or not, that time I plowed into a racetrack wall at 130 kph taught me a couple of lessons about handling and efficiency, too. Silver linings, right?
The hard truth is every rise in fuel prices ripples through the cost of everything else – groceries, supplies, even my son’s milk. You’d think the big economic think-tanks would’ve cracked the code on stabilizing this by now.
So here I am, thinking: maybe it’s time to start saving for a hybrid (Prius, here I come!), find a job closer to home, or dust off my sidelined business. Because trading fuel money for milk money? That’s not exactly the future I want for my family.
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