One of the more common ways you hear about to cut down your budget is "you should carpool." Fantastic idea, right? Gas is expensive and the carpool lane is usually faster than the other lanes! Putting it into practice usually generates more excuses than a kid who didn't do his homework.
My husband and I have been successfully carpooling for about a year now. We still have two cars, but with a baby on the way we've opted to hang on to that second car as our schedules will be changing. I do know a few couples that have saved a ton of money by sharing one car. If you can figure out a system that works well for your family to use one car, that's awesome, but we aren't there yet.
In any case, when we first moved out to the burbs, we had a variety of excuses for not carpooling. Here are our excuses, and the plan we put in place to overcome them.
Problem: Husband's excuse, "I don't want to see people from work when I don't have to, let alone spend an hour a day in the car with them." My excuse, "I don't want to have to have a set time to leave in the morning and exit at night since my schedule can change by day." Our excuse, "If I don't go to the gym on my way home then I won't go. A coworker carpool probably won't stop at the gym for you."
Solution: It doesn't say anywhere that you HAVE to carpool with people you work with. You don't necessarily have to carpool with someone in a nearby office building. We came up with the spousal carpool. Provided that you don't work in opposite directions from your house, this could work for a lot of people that wouldn't necessarily have thought of it. After all, this isn't something that initially occurred to us. Our offices are about 20 minutes apart and we'd take different freeways to work. In fact, if I didn't hate commuting and sitting in traffic so much, we may never have figured this all out. Before, his commute was about 35 to 45 minutes NW and mine was about 25 to 40 minutes N of our house. Now, with the help of the carpool lane, the drive to my work is about 20 minutes and then he continues on another 20 minutes to his work. So even though it takes him approximately the same amount of time to get to work, he drives a few extra miles and rarely sits in traffic. The drive between our offices is on a fairly deserted road, so he prefers that to the freeway.
Why it works for us: Living in the same house makes it easy to coordinate our schedules around one another. Much easier than I expected, in fact. We discuss when we have early meetings or might need to stay late, we hit the gym together and work our carpool around that. Also, you know your carpool is running late / ahead of schedule when you can observe each other's morning routine. We can remind each other of errands and run them on the way home together. The carpool is also a great way to sneak in some extra time together to catch up between working, doing chores, and attending various obligations. This system also works well for us because there aren't many times after arriving at work that I'd need a car. I work in a very "walkable" area of town with many restaurant options (in case I forget to pack lunch or am out of groceries), in addition to a bank and post office and various other errands I can get done during lunch. I also have a few coworkers who live nearby that I can turn to if he gets stuck working late.
Financial benefits: After factoring in the extra 2 miles out of the way on his trip and eliminating my 14 mile drive each way, that saves us 24 miles of driving per day. Also, my car gets about 7 more mpg than his car and has all the maintenance covered under warranty (including oil changes). By using the more efficient car we save even more on maintenance and gas. On average we save about $20 per week by carpooling. Additionally my husband's work has an incentive program for carpooling and we end up with a check for about $70 at the end of each month. Not bad!
Of course, no situation is ever perfect. I spend far more time listening to sports radio now, I clean some trash out of the car that I didn't bring into it, and I end up spending a little more time at work than I might have before. But we save money and I get dropped off at work "princess style" (according to my coworkers) without the stress of sitting in traffic. It's all worth it!
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