How to Organize Transportation Expenses

"I am going to present a topic on budgeting. Again with the help of Expert Village hopefully we'll be able to help people and assist people in terms of developing a budget. In this clip we've got another budget item that can have an impact to the budget and that is transportation or automobile expenses. This is something that I'm very, very familiar with having two automobiles in the household. So again this is something that I know in detail how it can impact the budget. Under the transportation/auto expense category there is basically there is basically three things that you can have. You can have a loan on your automobile or a lease item that we'll talk about, parking fees associated with it; maybe you work in a downtown area that has a parking garage that you are paying a monthly expense for and then auto service. There is just routine maintenance, unfortunately, that you have to take care of; changing the oil, brakes, those kinds of things that impact the budget. With loans and leases, that's fairly easily in the budget because either you're set up on a payment plan on a car loan or a car lease so again if you have a newer car you are paying whatever the monthly car note is. Let's use an example. Say you are paying $300 a month so you'd have that as your monthly budget item on the budget sheet. Parking fees; I remember when I worked in a downtown area, we had a parking garage and the fee was about $45 per month. So that's fairly easy, to include that in the budget. The item that's probably tough to get your arms around would be auto service because again that is not predictable. That?s going to depend on how new or how old your vehicle is and what kind of service requirements it requires. However you should try to look back, maybe a year back in your older records or maybe keep records for a year to determine how much the auto service is. In my case it normally runs about $1000 to $1200 because we are changing tires, we are getting brakes done on our cars at least once a year and we're changing the oil at least once or twice a year on our vehicles. So in my instance I include a budget of about $120 a month for car expenses. So again this is very important as it can have a huge impact on your budget. So I would encourage you to really be conservative on that auto service and make sure that you put enough float in that budget for the auto service."