Baa Baa Black Sheep... Three Bags Full!

Unstuffing status -- three bags full.
Today's stuff includes:
2 pillowcases
2 shirts (mine)
9 pieces of clothing from my youngest daughter

Children's clothes is an area where I have an embarrassment of riches right now. I was going through her clothes and found about 20 pairs of 3T pants. That's probably more pants than anyone, even a toddler, needs. What's funny is that the 9 pieces of clothing don't even include those 20 pairs of pants. Those I will assess another day. I will definitely pare it down, though, as it will cut down on arguments about clothes.

My husband came home today very angry about the car. Not only is it slurping down gas like nobody's business and making a funny sound that will probably cost hundreds of dollars, but my husband got a traffic ticket today. He says he won't be driving to school anymore and took the car key off of his key ring. He had to go back to school and he went on the scooter. An interesting turn of events, considering that I was just blogging about the car.

The current mileage on our car: 96048
Fuel expenses in Feb: 120.25 (15.90 for scooter fuel)
Fuel expenses in March (so far):104.55 (5.76 for scooter fuel)

Obviously fuel expenses are going to be higher in March. We went out of town for spring break, so we used more gas. Still, this shows that we are spending a pretty good chunk of money (although not as much as I had feared) on gas. Add to that repairs, oil changes, insurance, etc. and it's more than I would like.

I used this handy dandy calculator: http://www.bikesatwork.com/carfree/cost-of-car-ownership.html
According to this, we spend about 248 a month on driving. That's without calculating in the occasional ticket. I did not include car rental in the calculation because I wanted to see what it costs to drive our car. We will still have to rent a car when we go on vacation. For the cost of the car, I put 500 a year, because our car is paid for, but if we paid 4000 and it lasts 8 years, that's 500 a year. That may be wildly optimistic, but the point is that the price per month would not be lower... only higher.

So the only way to decrease the amount we spend on the car is to decrease the amount that we drive. Obviously. I've considered getting rid of the car in the past, but with 3 little kids, getting around can be pretty hard. My oldest can ride his bike for a couple of miles, and my oldest daughter can ride the tag-a-long, but the baby needs to go in the trailer, and the trailer and the tag-a-long don't work together (I've tried... I broke the gears on my bike pulling all the weight) and the girls are really heavy together in the trailer. It works pretty well if we go somewhere as a family because then I can pull the tag-a-long and my husband can pull the trailer. As you can see, it gets complicated. We also need the car to be able to go camping. I love camping.
I think the most realistic (baby step) thing to do about the car for now is to not drive to work. I will commit to that and keep track of mileage on the car for the next week and keep brainstorming.