PODCAST: How to Find a Job After Graduation, with Beth Handler-Grunt
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Links mentioned in this episode:
- Gas Prices Around the World
- Gas-Saving Tips That Actually Work
- IRS Increases Mileage Rates Because of High Gas Prices
- Beth Hendler-Grunt/Next Great Step
- Career Advice For New College Grads
- Kiplinger’s Economic Outlooks: Jobs
Transcript
David Muhlbaum: Welcome to Your Money’s Worth. I’m kiplinger.com senior online editor David Muhlbaum, joined by my cohost, senior editor Sandy Block. How are you doing, Sandy?
Sandy Block: I’m good. How was your road trip last weekend? I think you went to Chicago.
David Muhlbaum: Yes, there and back in one weekend to pick up a kid from college. A lot of miles. There’s a lot of bug jerky still plastered on the front of my car.
Sandy Block: Well, in Michigan we get fish flies and that’s worse. But you used a lot of gas, right? I hope you got the most out of all of your fuel-saving tips.
David Muhlbaum: Well, I can choose what metrics I want the car to show on the dash, and yeah, I had miles per gallon up there. The MPG I’m getting right now, the MPG, since I last filled up, the MPG for the whole trip. Yeah. I had my navigator, my daughter, next to me checking GasBuddy the whole time to find the lowest prices which, as you know, can vary by state.
Sandy Block: Mostly because of taxes.
David Muhlbaum: Yeah. Mostly. As we’ve heard here on the pod, environmental regulations and infrastructure, that matters too.
Sandy Block: Right. I’ve been thinking about this a lot because of an article we posted that’s getting a lot of traffic and was actually very interesting to me. It’s a very straightforward title, Gas Prices Around the World. Looking at that list as a reminder, well, and this was even true before, anyone who’s gone overseas knew this, things could be a lot worse. Americans are paying more for fuel these days, but they’re still paying a whole lot less than most other countries.
David Muhlbaum: Hah. I’m glad you saw that piece because I just updated the numbers in it. The simple answer is yeah, we’re in the bottom half for the data source that we used, which is a site called globalpetrolprices.com, petrol being British-speak for gasoline. We are the lowest of what that site calls economically advanced countries.
Sandy Block: Right. You can get gas pretty cheap some places, but they’re not necessarily places you want to go.
David Muhlbaum: Yeah. So Venezuela, Libya, Iran. Yeah. Those are the outliers, the places where gas is sold for — sometimes in limited amounts — for pennies, because of government subsidies. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that those places are oil-producing countries. That’s a significant factor as well. So even though oil is a global commodity, this can matter. But actually just because you have and produce oil doesn’t mean you’re going to make gas cheap. The biggest example of this is Norway, which has oodles of oil and gas, but they tax the heck out of it when it’s sold domestically.
Sandy Block: Right. The other example, and this is from personal experience, is Canada which has always had higher gas prices than we do I think basically because of taxes and other things. Years ago-
David Muhlbaum: Right. Another big oil producer.
Another big oil producer. Years ago, we went there on vacation. We pulled into a gas station and I thought, "Well, that’s not so bad. Gas prices aren’t that bad here. It looks about the
