His Hers Money

Well as of last Friday I no longer commute to work via car. Previously I have about a 15 minute commute to my office where my employer paid my $60/month parking fee. It really didn’t eat up THAT much gas but still resulting in a $75/month petrol bill. With the recent increase in gas prices I will be glad to leave the car at home.

As I have eluded to in previous postings, we recently moved to a new apartment. I wish I could say that the new apartment will be saving us money on rent and utilities but in reality it won’t. We didn’t make the move based on financial considerations but really just on general sanity (more on that later). Luckily the new place is exactly one mile from my office so as long as it’s not pouring down rain or over 100 degrees there’s really no reason for me not to walk.

I turned my parking garage opener in to my boss in exchange for a nice new shiny Smarttrip card. For those of you not in the Washington DC area, Smarttrip cards are like a little credit card which has preloaded funds on it to ride the public transportation. My company gives their emplyees two options for transportation, paid parking or paid public transportation. Even though I will be walking I took the public transportation option since I do ride it occasionally and I might as well ride free.

So Friday was my first day walking, it was an absolutely beautiful day weather wise and the walk was quite enjoyable. I recently had loaded my iPod with the audio version of Steven Covey’s 7 Habits book (from the local library) so I have plenty of listening material since it’s something like 14 discs long!

I even decided to cancel my local gym membership wince I will now be enjoying two miles of walking a day which has got to beat 2 hours of aerobics a week at something like $65/month. This brings my savings to about $115/month as I will still need to put some gas in my car for some errands and such.

Before you go thinking of where I could put those $115/month I will tell you where it’s going - a housekeeper. I am done spending my evenings and weekends trying to keep up with the cleaning. I would gladly walk to work in trade for house cleaning!

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