Get rich with bikes--and bike trailers

Mr. Money Mustache is a web site devoted to helping Americans save money and build their savings.  Interestingly enough, Mr. Money Mustache is also a huge bicycle advocate--not only for all the usual reasons we all love bicycling, but also for the money it saves: 

Mr. Money Mustache's bike and trailer

The fundamental reason for the Bike’s status as the Greatest Invention of All Time is its unique combination of simplicity, efficiency, and incredibly good health benefits. Interestingly enough, those are the opposite of a car’s attributes. The Bike is simple with just a few moving parts, simple enough for most people to maintain entirely on their own without paying a mechanic. . . .

But another side effect is that bikes are good for your wealth. Let’s start with the bare minimum: any mileage you put on your bike instead of your car saves you about 50 cents per mile in gas, depreciation, and wear and maintenance. From this savings alone, doing a couple of bike errands per day (4 miles) in place of car errands will add up to $10,752 over ten years.

However, Mr. Money Mustache is advocate of something even more radical: Using a bike trailer to actual run errands, pick up things, and do shopping.  In fact, running errands on the bike is more practical for many Americans than the often-recommended bicycle commuting--because there are grocery stores within easy bicycling distance of most of us, whereas the commute to work might be quite a lot longer.

And a simple bicycle trailer makes it all possible.

It's easy, fun, and builds some enjoyable exercise time out of time you'd spend driving and shopping anyway.  As Mr. Money Mustache says:

In the olden days, I still bought groceries by bike occasionally, but I was forced to use the car for the giant weekend runs, because you can only fit a few things in a backpack. Two jugs of milk and you’re already almost out of space. But with the bike trailer, as it turns out, you easily can fit a week’s worth of groceries for a family of four. I have packed spectacular quantities into even my small Nashbar trailer – one time I hauled $150 worth of items which I later weighed at 94 pounds – with very little effort.

So we’ve established that it is fun, and that Mr. Money Mustache likes to do it. But MMM can be intimidating at times, because he likes doingeverything, right?. Once in a comment on this blog, he was even accused of being likely to remove his own appendix if it ever started acting up.

To bridge the gap between myself and the Still Aspiring Mustachians, I decided to conduct an experiment last week. I decided to see if I could get my wife Mrs. Money Mustache to try using the bike trailer to get the groceries, for the first time in her life, and report back to me on how it went.

Read the results of Mrs. Money Mustache's Great Bike Shopping Experiment here.

Promoting a world class bicycle network for all types of bicycling--from racing to recreational cycling to commuting to mountain biking to utility cycling--is one of the primary objectives of MoBikeFed's Vision for Bicycling and Walking in Missouri.  Your membership helps make our Vision a reality!