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Apple Card Advertiser (0:00)
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Clark Howard (0:35)
It's my pleasure to welcome you here to the Clark Howard show where our mission is to serve you with advice and information that empowers you so you make better financial decisions in your life. And today I'm going to talk about how to deal with the crazy run up and gasoline prices is going on right now. And later, you know what's more expensive per gallon than gasoline? Printer ink. How much more expensive? Potentially 200 times more expensive. What do you do about it? I'm going to give you my suggestions. Actually I'm wrong about that. It's 2,000 times more expensive per gallon. Even worse than I said. We're going to talk about that ahead. Right now though, gas prices are moving up around the country much more other places in the world. We benefit from being the world's largest producer right now of gasoline. We don't have enough diesel production in the United States. And truckers and anyone who drives a diesel vehicle, you're feeling it big time right now with the shortage of available diesel the airline's feeling as I mentioned the other day and what they're paying for jet fuel. But for regular old gasoline, regular fuel, there's a pattern that always happens during times where the price of a barrel of oil and the cost of a gallon at wholesale moving very quickly up or down, the gap in price from one place to another is much wider than normal. Like let's say normally and I'm using round numbers here but there's normally in most areas within a reasonable radius of where you live there'll be about a dollar a gallon difference from the cheapest gas available near you to the most expensive gas near you. And I was looking what's the difference right now? And I was looking around me and then I looked at two other metro areas and it was about a buck 75 a gallon within a five mile radius from the cheapest to the most expensive. So right now what you have is you have stations that have not received a new load of fuel that's going to lead to a higher price or marketing decisions where A gasoline retailer, you might find this with supermarkets to sell gas or Walmart gas stations or the warehouse clubs, they are using this as a marketing opportunity and they're absorbing some of the increase leading to this much wider gap than normal. So what I like for you to do at a time of volatility like this is that you start paying attention to what prices are on your route. When you're at half a tank and as you're driving down a road and you see, oh, that's a good price over there, that's much cheaper than I've seen recently. Go ahead, go fill up. You know, also use GasBuddy.com and see what's near you that you didn't know because maybe it's not a route you normally drive, but a mile away there could be a place that's offering much cheaper gasoline. And I wanted to tell you that there's been story after story since this started with the higher gas prices. Well, is this when you should buy an electric vehicle? No. People don't make a decision to ditch a vehicle and buy another one just because of temporary price movements. Because once things are settled in Iran, however, that's going to be the cost of a gallon of gas. It'll take a while, but it'll trend back down. Because prior to hostilities beginning in the Middle east, the world had the opposite problem. We had production of oil exceeding what underlying demand was in the world. So it'll take a while, but we'll get supply and demand back in sync. And nobody's going to want that more than trucking companies and individual tractor owners because their cost of pulling that trailer down the interstate is so high right now on electric vehicles. So I wanted to say that if you're in the market for a vehicle, the cost of used electric vehicles, because electric so out right now, the cost of used ones is a deal. And they're so cheap to run versus a gas engine vehicle that if it fits your lifestyle, looking at one as an alternative, just make sure that the battery is covered for a sufficient number of years and miles still to come. Because you don't want to buy that kind of trouble if you're near the end of the warranty or a vehicle's already out of warranty on the batteries, the battery goes. That's a big number. Repair.