Do you want to save on the gas expense for more than 30%? Well, it is actually quite easy. I will tell you in details in this post.
To do it, there are several criteria you will need to check:
- Can you afford to comfortably push off some spending for future use like a month?
- There are grocery chain such as Safeway, Kroger, Tom Thumb that offers fuel point program near you.
The way the fuel points works is that, you buy stuff in the grocery store, for each $1 you spend you get 1 point. Every 100 point (or every $100 you spend in the store), you can use to get 10 cents/gallon for one gas filling (for up to 25 gallon or 35 gallon depend on the store) in the gas station operated by the grocery store. If you have spend $1000 in the grocery store in the month, you can basically save $1/gallon at the gas pump. The current gas price is $3.34, so you will roughly save 30% in the trip.
You might say, I can not spend $1000 a month in the grocery store. Can I use it? Me neither, but there is an even better way of using the fuel program.
It turn out that the grocery store also sell gift card and prepaid credit cards. For each dollar spend in the gift card, you actually get more points (4x or 2x). Look at the following description of Tom Thumb program for example.
They offer 4x fuel points, so you only need to buy $250 gift card from Tom Thumb for 1000 points. Kroger have similar program, but base is 2x and often run promotion for 4x. They both have good selection of card choices: super market (Target, Walmart), restaurant (Olive Garden, MCD), department store (Nordstrom, Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, JC Penny), home improvement (Lowe’s, Home Depot), Brand store (Nike, etc), Amazon, iTunes, etc.
For me, I used Target and Amazn a lot so it wouldn’t be a problem to consume a couple of hundreds of gift cards. You might also be able to find some stores that you are going anyways and stock up some gift cards.
To beef up the deal a little bit more, you can use some credit cards that give extra cash back for grocery store category. I am using American Express Blue Cash Preferred which offers 6% back for grocery stores.
For example, last month, I purchased $1000 worth of gift card from Tom Thumb, got $60 in cash back. With the 4000 fuel points I got, I saved 30% on all my gas money which is roughly $15*4=$60 (if you have a bigger car you can save up to $100 on gas). Not bad at all, huh?