measuring dollar economy on the car.

We have been driving the new car for about a two months, and I was thinking "how do I measure the affect it was having on the household financials?" Since the car is a novated leased car, I need to keep detail record whenever I visited the petrol station and fill it up with petrol. The information that I keep are

• Cost of the petrol
• The amount of petrol I pumped into the car
• The odometer reading when I pumped petrol into the car
• Date and time

Fortunately, these information are all on the collected, printed out on the receipt and handed to you by the station attendant. The standard measure is fuel economy which measures how much fuel is used over a set distance. So far, the car's fuel economy is 13.55 ltr per 100km. I felt that this is more a measure of how the car is performing and does not really give you a sense on how it is affecting the wallet.

From a dollars and cents perspective, I converted this figure to become dollar economy by multiplying the amount of fuel by the average cost of the fuel. This was calculated to be about $18.5 per 100km. Obviously, this figure will fluctuate with the price of fuel, and that is a good thing as it clearly shows the true value of your fuel usage.

To put that dollar figure into perspective, if we drove to Ballarat to visit the in-laws, the trip would cost about $20 on fuel alone. Plus the $20 for the trip home.

I am gathering a spreadsheet to help perform this calculation quickly. If you are interested in getting a copy of the spreadsheet, send me an email tehn.yit.chin @ gmail . com or leave a message in the comments. The spreadsheet should be available in the next few days.