HispanicBusiness

If you're like most people, sticker shock is now the name of the game whenever you pull your car into the gas station. Gas prices keep inching higher and it's not going to get better in the near-term.

Crude oil prices hit an all-time high last week when they lapped the $126 mark. These prices are for June deliveries, so drivers should be braced for gradually higher prices over the next few weeks.

Remember when the media was all abuzz about oil topping the $100 a barrel mark? That was just a couple of months ago. If only my investments were climbing that quickly!

In the real world, I've noticed that few consumers understand what these crude oil commodity prices actually mean. I did a radio interview last week, where the host asked me about oil hitting "a buck and 26 cents" earlier. Maybe he meant it to be stylish. I think he just doesn't understand the concept and its relation to gasoline.

Let's go over that quickly this week. A barrel means 42 gallons of crude oil. In other words, when you hear about crude oil hitting $126 a barrel, it breaks down to $3 a gallon. Now if you've ever seen crude oil -- whether it's in "There Will Be Blood" or watching Jed Clampett hunting for some food "when out from the ground came some bubbling crude" -- you know that this syrupy, thick, black oil never makes it into your tank. It needs to go to a refinery to convert it into car fuel. The purifying process means that a barrel of oil will produce less than 42 gallons of gasoline. It's after that point when you have to tack on a series of taxes and the gas station's markup.

Work the math and you can already see why $4 gallons of gas are popping up in certain markets, with consumers already bracing for the $5 mark. In my next column I'll go over ways to save money on your fuel consumption, but for now, go ahead and see if you can catch a "Beverly Hillbillies" rerun, knowing that you now know more about crude oil than Jed Clampett himself.

Rick Munarriz is a personal finance columnist for HispanicBusiness.com. He has written for sites such as The Motley Fool and Citysearch, with appearances on NPR, TechTV, Sirius, and CNN en Español. He can be reached through http://www.Reportedly.com where he discusses his latest articles.