Road Trip Gas Money Saving Hack to Try This Weekend
Near Glen Canyon Dam, Arizona
By Jeff
May 27, 2025
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Gasoline Prices Swing Wildly
Did you know the price of gas can swing 50 cents per gallon or more within a few blocks in a city? The price also often swings wildly from town to town on a long road trip, especially if you’re crossing state lines. If you typically fill up with 15 gallons of gas, saving 50 cents per gallon is $7.50 saved each time you fill up.
If you commute to work you’re probably buying gas about 2 times per week. Watching the price you’re paying at the pump could be saving you $15 bucks per week. Over the course of a month that’s $60 dollars you could be investing or at least spending on something else more fun than gas.
Let’s think also about this in terms of percentages. If gas costs $2.75 at Gas Station A and $3.25 at Gas Station B, you are paying 18% more if you’re buying at Gas Station B! Gasoline is a commodity, it is essentially the exact same thing no matter where you buy it. So why pay 18% more?
The Longer the Drive, the More it Matters
The cost savings really start to add up on road trips. For example, a single road trip from Wisconsin to Denver, Colorado and back is about 2000 miles. A typical SUV gets about 25 miles to the gallon on highway driving. Some quick math tells us we are going to use about 80 gallons of fuel for this trip. Saving 50 cents per gallon on 80 gallons of fuel is $40 bucks back in your pocket.
A Lifetime of Savings Adds Up
Saving $15 bucks per week on fuel is $780 per year with continued investing at an 8% rate of return will grow to $96,210 over the course of 30 years. You can search compound interest calculators in case you’d like to prove this out for yourself.
This Savings Technique Works for More Than Just Gas
It might be gasoline, cans of vegetables, eggs, or Pop Tarts. When prices are high, Angie & I try our best to buy less. When prices are low, we buy more and stock up.
When the price is high for any given item we almost always buy less of it; or we substitute with something different. Gasoline, however, is sometimes a necessary item no matter what the price and that’s why we use a tool to help us find the best price possible for this necessary expense.
The GasBuddy App & the Find Gas Button
GasBuddy is an app you can put on your phone that will show you all the gas prices being reported around you. By pressing the Find Gas button in the app near the top of your smartphone screen, the app will immediately show you a list of gas prices for stations nearest to you. It also tells you how long it’s been since the price was reported for each gas station in the list. Near the top of the screen you’ll see the price spread between the highest price in the area and the lowest price in the area.
GasBuddy Map
If you want to plan ahead to save even more money a few more miles down the road on your trip, you can click the Map button in the upper right hand corner of the screen of the GasBuddy app and this will take you to a map view showing gas stations brands and prices reported. You can scroll around on this screen by touching with one finger and moving the map.
You can also zoom in on the map by placing two fingers on the screen and moving your fingers apart. Zoom back out by moving two fingers closer together on the screen. This is how you can easily check gas prices along your route for the entire day of your travel and plan your gasoline fill up stops for the towns that have the lowest prices per gallon.
When you’re using the map feature, you will see the “Map” button changes to a “List” button. Click on the “List” button to go back to a list of the stations that are nearest to you at the current moment.
Other Variables
There are always a few variables in play on a road trip besides just planning gas stops. Sometimes you get hungry, maybe you need a break to stretch, or maybe you just gotta stop and pee; the realities of life. These other variables might become more important than the price of gasoline at a given moment in time.
Sometimes these other variables cause us to have to adjust our route. And that’s ok. Life has variables. We try our best to calculate how far we can make it on the current tank of gas while also choosing the best place to stop and fill up at a good price while also considering what we want to do with our time.
Does it make sense to drive 20 minutes into town to save an additional 5 cents per gallon? Maybe or maybe not. Maybe the town has something interesting to see that you can also enjoy and be out of the car for a bit. Or maybe there’s a special food item at a certain restaurant, like a pizza farm that’s worth checking out. What you do during any given planned gas stop also depends on how busy your day is and how quickly you need to get to your end destination for the day. There are some situations where time is more important than money.
Map View Lets You See the Most Options
Using the map view, you can look at the route you will be traveling and see what towns have the best prices for gas as compared to the towns around it. It is usually a fairly quick process to find where the lower prices for gas are and then set one of those stations as the next destination on your route. Using the map in the GasBuddy app will allow you to breeze through areas that have extraordinarily high gas prices and land yourself in more price-friendly zones. I think once you start using the app you’ll find yourself saying, “Wow, I sure am glad we didn’t have to buy gas there!” I still say that to Angie at least once on every road trip we take.
The GasBuddy app is a network of thousands of people working together to report gas prices in real time at gas stations they visit. Together, as a collective, all the users are helping each other out across the entire United States by reporting the prices shown on the pump as they pull into a gas station to fill up. There are normally three grades of gasoline listed: Unleaded, Mid-Grade , and Premium. In addition, there is often Ethanol, branded as E-85, which yields fewer miles per gallon as compared to gasoline, and Diesel.
The Find Directions Button
One small gripe we have with the GasBuddy app is if you are using it an iPhone, the Find Directions button will constantly want you to use Apple Maps and there is no way to copy and paste the address of your target gas station to Google Maps, if that is your preferred routing system. You must type the address into Google Maps yourself.
This minor annoyance is still worth it to us because of the massive savings we rack up by saving with GasBuddy. If you like using Apple Maps it’s not even going to affect you.
The GasBuddy App is FREE !
Gas Buddy is a free app and there is no cost to sign up for the app.
Happy gas savings!
