When I first started driving in high school, I had to pay for my own gas. Since I was also saving for college, I had to be careful about my spending, so I started manually tracking how much I was paying for gas in a spreadsheet and calculating how much gas I was using. Whenever I filled my tank, I kept the receipts and wrote down how many miles I'd traveled and how many gallons I'd used. Every few weeks, I would manually enter all of this information into the spreadsheet and plot out the costs and the amount of fuel I had used. This process helped me both visualize how much money I was spending on fuel and manage my budget. Once I got to college, however, I got a more fuel-efficient car and my schedule got a lot busier, so I didn't have the time to track my fuel consumption like this anymore. Now I work at Wolfram Research and I'm still really busy, but the cool thing is that I can use our company technology to more easily accomplish my automotive assessments.