My husband and I are both commuters. He normally takes the bus and I normally take the train, but I don’t have to go to my place of work every day. Sometime I work from home or at another location. Nevertheless, I buy a monthly train ticket which is a lot cheaper than buying single tickets. Hubby has to buy a ticket book because the bus he rides does not offer a monthly ticket. (The bus is still a touch cheaper than the monthly train ticket.) Besides, the bus gets him closer to his place of work than the train does. But he could take the train if we thought that spending the higher commuting cost was worth it. We don’t think it is worth it which is why he usually rides the bus.

When I don’t take the train, however, he is more than happy to use my monthly ticket so that he can take the train on those days. After all, the train ride is much more comfortable than the bus ride and he does not mind walking a little further to his office. And to boot, he can use the monthly train ticket instead of using a daily bus ticket, which ”saves” us money.

When we set up a budget, we accounted for our ticket expenses – the ticket books for him and the monthly train ticket for me. But when he takes the train and he does not use his bus tickets, he can save the bus tickets for another day. That means he does not spend as much money on his commute as we had thought he would. What do we do with these extra savings? Well, we kind of just add them to our general savings account.

Asking this question reminds me once again why writing a personal finance blog may not only benefit the reader but also the writer. As I was thinking about another answer to the question above, I was wondering whether I should suggest to hubby that we set up a separate savings account where we track these extra savings. That way we would know exactly how much money we are saving by combining our commuter expenses. Every time he takes the train, he puts the money not used on the bus into this savings account. I bet you we will end up with a nice junk of money at the end of the year.

I will keep you posted how this separate commuter savings account progresses. I am already really excited about this little change in our savings behavior.