Cycling Socialization: Ride your bike and save money!

You may be thinking that the idea of riding your bike to save money is all about saving your gas money.  I'm here to tell you otherwise.  There can be much more money saved from time to time and the way to save money is through socialization!  That's right, riding your bike with others and talking to them!  I went on a ride the other morning with my brother and we got to talking.  I asked him if he could take me to pick up my car from the dealership later in the day because I was going to take it in after our ride to have some maintenance done.  He said, "What are you going to have done?" I gave him short list of the things I knew needed done and he told me he could do all of that and to bring my car over after our ride.  After the ride I brought over my car, we checked out everything that needed to be done, made a list of the parts we needed, went to Autozone, bought what we needed for $140 (remember that number) and spent a couple of hours fixin' up my car.  I thanked my brother profusely becuase I knew I had saved at least $500 since that was a general number I had heard to change out my brake pads.  I was curious though as to exactly how much I saved so I made a call to the dealership where I was going to go.  I thought it was going to cost about $900 total for the work to be done and I was pretty close.  They told me $650 to check the parts and change out the fluids I needed and an extra $250 for the front brakes and $190 for the rear brakes to be changed out.  A total cost of $1090!(cough cough heart-attack). Savings made because I went for a ride that morning and I have an Awesome Brother who was nice enough to help me out was a grand total of $950! That's money in my pocket!

I just want to add that everything that we did was extremely easy (even changing out the brake pads, which required loosening 1 bolt!).  Luckily my brother knows cars well enough that he could inspect everything else.  The moral of this story is the title of the post: Ride your bike and save money! Get out there and talk to those you ride with. Socialize and have fun while spinning those wheels. Keep some money in your pocket.

Also, if your interested, the things we did to the car besides the inspection included: changing the oil, oil filter, dust and pollen filter, air cleaner element, front and rear brake pads. We also rotated the tires and topped of the coolant.