Pinched at the Pump
Stopping for gas on a recent evening commute, Joseph Godino paused to make a call before feeding his credit card into the pump's built-in reader.
He listened as a recorded voice delivered welcome news: His card still had $88 of credit available.
The gas-up was a go.
"I had to phone up to find out if I had enough credit on there to fill up," said Godino, 58, whose workday round-trip commute is a whopping 200 miles.
"The gas is just really hurting me. I don't know what to do
Godino, an Apple Valley resident whose truck driving job is based in Buena Park, signed up for extra shifts and financial counseling, and his wife went back to work to add income. But he has fallen further behind. With his gas cards maxed out, Godino has switched to filling his tank using a Visa card.
California's sky-high gasoline prices are slamming Godino and other motorists who had been barely getting by. Californians, saddled with the nation's priciest gasoline outside of Hawaii, are paying more than 70 cents a gallon extra compared with a year ago and nearly $1 more than two summers back.
The wallop is worsened by interest rates that are at their highest levels in more than five years, boosting adjustable-rate mortgages and credit card bills and jacking up the minimum payments on most credit cards.
Economists largely have shrugged off the financial effect of higher fuel costs on consumers. They say that gasoline demand and road vacations continue to rise and that today's pump prices only recently approached the record-high retail prices that forced drivers to pay the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $3 a gallon for gas for a short time in 1981.
But as Godino's plight illustrates, the fiscal fallout already is showing up at the lower end of the wage scale. And anecdotal evidence suggests that high gasoline costs are forcing people to make adjustments at nearly all income levels.
That's especially so in California, where long commutes are the norm and public transit is of little use to the masses who in recent years moved ever farther from their jobs to find affordable housing.
"For some people, their cost for gas has doubled in a short amount of time," said Susan Ulaga, senior vice president at Consumer Credit Counseling Services, a California nonprofit. "People are able to shift money around for a while, but eventually the credit card limits kick in
