There is nothing quite as fun as gathering up your family or your friends for a good old fashioned summer road trip. Sure, things like sitting in traffic due to all the summer road construction zones can put a damper on things at the moment, but the trip itself is still usually very rewarding.
For me, road trips are great because they offer a cheap way for a group of people to get to a destination. When you want to take your family or friends on vacation, the individual plane tickets can cost a lot where as fuel costs are your main expense when road tripping.
Of course, depending on how far you plan on traveling, those fuel costs for your road trip can really add up to be a major expense. If you are like me and prefer to budget out the costs in advance, then you can really help yourself keep those costs super low.
Want to know my top tip for keeping summer road trip fuel costs low?
The GasBuddy app (find it here). This app is free, which is great news for the budget. If you’ve never used the GasBuddy website before, then let me briefly explain how it works. GasBuddy maintains an up-to-date database of current gas prices all across the United States and Canada. Regular people like you and me keep the prices current by inputting them regularly. You can find the cheapest gas in a city, down to the location of that gas station.
The coolest feature of GasBuddy is the trip calculator. You just input your starting and ending points, as well as your vehicle info, and you will get a great estimate of the total gas costs for your trip. It even tells you where to stop for the fill up and what the current price is that you will pay per gallon.
I take a lot of road trips and I have really found no better way to keep the gas costs in check and under budget.
