percantage of other costs
Chad,
I read through all of the other posts hoping someone would comment on my thoughts. The closest to my thoughts were from Paul when he talks about his initial 1.75/gal costs going up to 3.00/gal and he was still flying. As Paul mentioned, as long as we can pay our bills we will continue to spend money on flying.
Why are we still flying when fuel price goes up by a nickel/gal, fifty cents/gal, a dollar/gal, doubles, triples, quadruples in price? Because when we pay those additional prices we are paying from one overall pot of money. So just looking at the end price of
$X.xx as a finite point when we say
"ENOUGH IS ENOUGH", will be a subjective figure that even within our own thought processes we will change. The reason for this is that we are not using that
$X.xx figure in a comparison analysis. That is the only true way any of us will be able to adequately answer your question.
How are we going to do that? Well, we have to compare that
$X.xx/gal to the overall lump sum of money we think we have to pull that money from. This is going to be a
percentage of the "Overall Cost to Live" we have set for ourselves. This Overall Cost to Live will be the total dollar amount of our net income, savings, etc. that supplies the money to support our existance. So if we think of the
$X.xx/gal it cost for fuel for our
hobby, we need to analyze the percentage of the fuel expense in comparison to the overall dollar amount we have to spend. Divide the $X.xx/gal * the total amount of fuel purchased for fuel spent (F) by the total amount of money we have available to us to spend (M) and multiply by 100 to get a percentage of overall money available to spend (%I).
Thus a formula for an annual fuel expense might look like this:
(F/M)*100 = %I
So an example: if I spend 5.00/gal and I use 500 gallons in a year (5.00 * 500 = $2500) and then I compare that figure to the overall available money, say $50,000 (net income + savings + etc.) we can look at a percentage of the overall amount of money I have.
($2500/$50000)*100 = 5%
I am spending 5% of my total amount of available money in a year for fuel for the airplane.
This is the number we need to analyze. What percentage of the overall money available to me am I willing to spend before I say
"ENOUGH IS ENOUGH"? Is it 5%, 10%, 25%, 50% of my overall amount of money available?
Of course, we cannot do this analysis in a vacuum. The truth is, all of the other things we spend money on have to be analyzed in this manner too. Once we do that though, we can start doing an analysis that will allow us to PRIORITIZE our expenses. That is to say:
Based on a Prioritized List I creat that shows me the Percentage of money I am spending on Fuel for the airplane, fuel for the car, food on the table, house payment, kids education, etc., etc., etc. I can now figure out at what point do I have to look at stopping spending money on fuel for the airplane, or flying all together.
Well I hope you get the picture. Once we can determine what
percentage of the overall costs of our house hold expense is going to this
hobby, we will then be able to answer for ourselves the question you pose.
It does take more than just looking at hard and fast DOLLAR amounts for us to make that determination.
Well, I most certainly did not intend to reply with such a long post. This is the manner in which I analyze whether I am going to spend money on flying or not. I hope it makes sense and that I have explained my thoughts well enough to be understood.
Live Long and Prosper.