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Although the price of gas has dropped a little bit over the past few weeks, it is still really expensive to fill up. Here in Seattle, premium gas is over $4.30/gallon. For me, this means that I am paying $.24 per mile to drive my car. While there are a lot of trips where driving a car simply makes more sense, I am starting to find that there are quite a few trips that can be just as easily traveled by bicycle.

In order to assist me, I have a speedometer on my bike to assist me in calculating my distance. To be specific, the bicycle computer that I use is the Sigma 906. It currently retails for $22.98 at Pricepoint.com. It is a pretty simply bicycle computer. It is nothing too fancy, but it takes care of the essential functions like trip and total distance, current speed, max speed and average speed. My only gripe is that I haven’t been able to find an easy way to reset all of the values of a trip. If I erase the trip distance, the trip time will remain active. Because of this I have to go through and manually reset every statistic.

Anyway, I am using this bicycle computer to help me to track how much I have saved on riding my bike. So far I have ridden 16.82 miles, which has saved me $4.04. This isn’t much, but it can add up over a course of a year depending on how much I actually ride. For the most part I am able to keep up with traffic and Seattle does a good job of providing bike lanes and other places to ride. I would be a bit quicker if I had a road bike instead of a mountain bike, and slick tires instead of knobby treaded ones. So far I have ridden to the book store, the drug store, and my girlfriends place and back.

The best part is even if I am not saving money, I am still getting some exercise in the process.

I finished up last week with $14, so I took out $100 to bring my cash up to $114 for the week. I actually took out $200, but $100 of it went straight to Dad to pay off the rest of my present to Mom. Here is what I spent my cash on this week.

• $33 for groceries
• $15 for discounted movie tickets through work
• $6 for Arby’s
• $4 for Starbucks
• $13 in cab rides
• $15 for beer
• $4 on unknown items

I think I can skip talking about the money that I spent on general groceries, since they are something that I will be buying every week and are a necessity of life. I spent $15 on discounted movie tickets through my employer. They are $7.50 each rather than $9-$10 each that one would regularly pay. I am actually going to be reimbursed for these at a later date since my girlfriend wanted me to get them so that she could give them as a gift, so technically this wasn’t an expense for me. I spent $6 at Arby’s the other day. They had the 4 roast beef sandwiches for $5 deal going on, so we took advantage of it. Throw in a little tax and you have $6. I spent $4 on Starbucks on Saturday on my way to taking my girlfriend to the ferry docks for her work retreat. This Saturday was our friend’s birthday, so we went over to their house to play beer pong. I bought an 18-pack of Bud Light to play with. It cost $15, but a friend chipped in $7, so it truly only cost me $8. After beer pong we took cabs to Fremont. It cost $11 to get there from the U-District. On the way back from the bars I threw in an extra $2 to help pay for the cab. I also incurred $4 of unknown expenses. I’m not really sure where that came from. Now that I have all my stuff up and running I shouldn’t have to have too many more unaccounted expenses.

I had a total “spending” of $90 for the week, but I was helped by $7 being contributed for the beer, and a repayment of $8 for our internet bill. This results in a net cash flow of $75 for the week. Since I started with $114, this leaves me with $39 at the end of the week. Tomorrow I will go ahead and take $80 out of the machine.

So far the strategy of using just cash has been working pretty well. I have had to pull out the debit card a time or two, but I have limited that fairly well. For the most part, I only use my debit in times of emergency. I have also pulled it out when I was in a rush to pay and didn’t feel like searching through my wallet for money. So without further ado, here is my cash management for the week.

Since I had $60 already in my wallet, I pulled out an additional $60 from the ATM. Here is what I spent it on:

• $22 for groceries at Fred Meyers
• $14 for Vodka at the Liquor Store
• $9 at the local ice cream shop
• $8 for wine at QFC
• $32 for dinner at a tapas bar
• $21 (not sure where it was spent)

This totals $106 for the week, leaving me with $14 left in cash at the end of the week.

Here is a little insight on why I bought what I did. $22 for groceries at Fred Meyers really goes without saying. You have to eat to live you know. I spent $14 on the vodka because we were having a game night with friends. I got Svedka, which isn’t a bad vodka at all. $9 was spent at an ice cream shop in Wallingford called Molly Moo’s. It was a bit expensive, but the ice cream was really good and I think it was organic as well. It was a nice day and there was a line of about 15 people waiting to get some. I spent $8 on wine to bring to my Grandma’s house because we were celebrating my mom’s 50th bday, and you don’t want to show up empty handed to Grandma’s house! I spent $32 to go to this tapas bar in Ballard called Ocho. It was really good food, but a very small restaurant. The bartender owned the joint and was making some crazy concoctions during the time we were there. They had a dog named Ginger that slept on the floor. Check out this link for a much better review. Finally, there is this mysterious $21 that I can’t for the life of me remember where I spent it. That is the trouble with cash. If you lose a receipt it is a pain to try to remember what you spent things on. Normally I would input it into Microsoft Money, but since my computer was all messed up I couldn’t.