With house prices in city centres, especially London, getting out of control, more and more people are having to commute to work. Even if you’ve got a fairly decent job in the city centre, wages are often not high enough to be able to afford rent or a mortgage on a place nearby. You’ve got to decide to either leave the job and find somewhere closer to you or commute into the city. For some people, they don’t have much choice because they wouldn’t be able to find an equivalent position outside of the city and so they have to make that sacrifice for their career.
The only problem is, commuting can be expensive and if you’re already struggling to make ends meet it might not be financially viable to stay at the job you’re in. That’s a real issue if you’re making good career progress where you are now so you need to find a way to make it more manageable to stay at your current job.
You can always ask your boss if they’ll be willing to help you cover some of the costs. You’d be surprised how often they’ll be willing. If you’re a valued employee that they don’t want to lose, they’ll often prefer to pay out a bit more money to cover your travel rather than find somebody else.
If they aren’t willing, you’ll need to find another way to make it more affordable Here are some great ways that you can reduce the cost of commuting.
If You Drive
If you’re driving to work, the major costs you have to consider are fuel costs and the price of running the car itself. The running costs of the car are pretty easy to cut, especially the insurance. Most people will search for the best price when they first get the policy but after that, they’ll renew with the same company each year without looking for a better deal. Every year when the policy runs out, you should check cheap car insurance comparison websites to see if you could be paying less. If you’ve got a car that’s particularly powerful it’ll cost you more to insure so it might be worth downgrading.
When it comes to cutting the fuel costs, things are a little trickier. Again, downgrading your car to something that has better fuel consumption is a good way to save a lot of cash but unfortunately, you haven’t got any control over the price of fuel so you’ll need to find other ways to reduce it.
Car sharing is a great idea so it’s worth checking if anybody else at work lives nearby. You can drive to work together and split the cost of the fuel in half. Even if you can’t find anybody else at work to share with, there are some great sites like Liftshare where you can post your address and destination and find people that you can share with.
YourParkingSpace is another great site that can help you save on your commute. If you’re taking the car to work, your parking space is empty all day so why not make some money from it? You can advertise it on the site and somebody who works near your house can rent it for less than they’d pay in a car park. It’s a win-win for both of you and you can use the cash to cover your fuel costs.
If you’re buying your ticket on the day you’re going to spend a fortune. You can save a bit of money by getting weekly or monthly travel passes, but they’re still going to cost you a lot. The cheapest way to pay for train tickets is a yearly travel pass, but most people don’t have the money to pay for a whole years travel in one lump sum.
Luckily, there’s a great website called CommuterClub which has solved that problem. They offer a yearly pass at the same price, but you can pay for it in monthly installments. That way, you get the best of both worlds; you can travel at a reduced price but you don’t need to put all of the cash in upfront.
If it’s still too expensive for you to commute, even when you’ve got a reduced rate from a yearly pass, you need to think about what time you travel. Peak times, when everybody needs to get to and from work, are the most expensive. If your boss isn’t willing to pay toward your travel costs, it might be worth asking if you can adjust your work hours so you’re travelling in the off-peak period which will be cheaper.
If you’re considering changing your job because the commute is just too expensive, try these tricks to reduce the amount you spend on travel before making any drastic decisions.
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