There are several ways to reduce your overall expense of gas purchases even before you consider changing your driving habits or taking any actions on your car. The most rudimentary of these is to find the stations that have the lowest prices.

Sounds pretty obvious but for some reason when it comes to gas this elementary behavior is thwarted. If you were buying a camera you would shop around for the store with the lowest price. For some reason most of us were trained to treat gas differently. You probably buy gas where it is convenient regardless of price. The closest gas station to where you live is a likely place for your fill ups regardless of price.

When your gas gauge shows your tank is low and certainly when you think you might run out of gas you fill up at the very first station you find. In most cases this station will not have the best gas prices. This is one more instance where you may be buying gasoline at a higher price than you should.

A great way to find a station that has the lowest prices is to search the internet. There are a lot of websites that list local gas prices. They list the prices and the locations of the stations where they are found. Here are a few:

GasBuddy.com

Automotive.com

FuelMeUp.com

Searching for gas prices online is a great idea because you can look for the best gas prices without driving. You can find the best gas prices without burning gas to do it. This is important because burning gas to save money on gas is a self defeating strategy.

Studies done by the AAA indicate that it costs on average approximately 51.7 cents per mile to operate your car. So every three miles you drive to find a better price could be costing you $1.50.

That means that if you need to put 15 gallons into your car you have to save about 10 cents for every three miles you drive. If you can find low price gas by not driving around to find it, for every three miles in travel you have eliminated, you have gained 10 cents per gallon.

This is important to remember when doing your online research. If the gas stations with the lowest gas prices are 6 miles away from your usual fill up spot, you have to beat the price of your usual spot by 20 cents just to break even. That is why you need to utilize the information in a manner that saves money rather than costs money.

The smartest way to utilize the online pricing information, is to use it to plan your driving activities. If you need to pick up your dry cleaning and one of the lowest priced stations is next to the cleaners, you should plan on filling up at that station when you pick up your cleaning.

The internet is a great resource in your quest to lower your gas costs. If you can utilize the information garnered online along with proper planning of where and when you will fill up, then you should start to see considerable savings.