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If you’re in the market for a new car, stop fixating on gas prices and buy a lightly used car. You’ll save literally thousands of dollars.

That’s the advice of a new study by Consumer Reports.

“Late-model used cars are in the sweet spot of auto deals,” CR says. On average, consumers save 32 percent in the first five years by buying a three-year-old car. With a one or two-year-old car, they can save 19 and 27 percent, respectively.

EXAMPLES

• Buying a 2005 Toyota Camry with a V6 engine could save consumers $13,000 over five years compared with buying a new 2008 version. At $4 per gallon, drivers could pay for all their gas and still be $2,500 ahead.
• Driving a 2005 Ford Focus can save more than $8,000 over the first five years, compared with buying the new Focus.
• With values for used SUVs plummeting, drivers could save $25,500 over five years by buying a three-year-old Chevrolet Tahoe instead of a new one.
  

“A reliable late-model used car can be one of the best values out there when buying a car,” Rik Paul, CR automotive editor said in a new release. “Savvy shoppers can also get a more upscale model with more features for the same owner cost as a less expensive new car.”

NOT SOMEONE ELSE’S PROBLEMS

                     Many people shy away from buying a used car because they’re afraid of buying someone else’s problems. Yet CR’s reliability data show that cars, overall, are much more reliable than they used to be. Rust and exhaust-system problems, once common in older cars, are no longer of major concern. And reliable late-model vehicles usually have few problems overall.

HOWEVER…

CR found says that because some popular models, such as the Mini Cooper and Toyota Prius, don’t depreciate much, buying a used version of those models results in modest savings.

The full report is available in the October issue of Consumer Reports and online now at www.ConsumerReports.org.

Farecast.com is the Web site, bought this year by Microsoft, that uses historical trends to try to predict airfares. That helps consumers answer the nagging question, “Should I book now or wait until fares drop?”

Farecast says in a news release this week that airfares for the holidays are up more than 30 percent over last year, which could mean spending an extra $100 or more.

It offers these tips:

• Be flexible with your travel dates. If you have flexibility, you will be rewarded with big savings. Returning on Monday or Tuesday vs. Sunday might save you more than $90 per ticket.
• Watch October for holiday price drops. Most previous late-December itineraries saw price drops in the first two weeks of October. Farecast data suggest there are 50% more price drops during the holidays than other times of the year, so alerts are critical to catch elusive deals.
• If you’re traveling from a big market, you should wait. Major markets are much more likely to see price drops this fall, and you should closely monitor for lower fares before purchasing. If you’re flying out of smaller/regional airports, you should buy as soon as you find a fare you’re comfortable with.
• You will pay more this year. Unless you find the deal of the season, you will pay more for holiday flights than in years past. You should accept this and not hold out for a lower fare. It likely won’t come, and the cost will just continue to rise.

Click the screenshot above for video advice about saving money on food, insurance and telecommunications – what I call being financially FIT. My contribution was recorded outside the WPVI studios in Philadelphia. I was at the studio doing a satellite interview for an ABC affiliate in Virginia Beach, Va., promoting my book, “Living Rich by Spending Smart.” The consumer reporter in Philadelphia, Nydia Han, overheard my satellite interview and wanted to do one of her own. She was able to cram a lot of advice into a short segment.

It’s great that the Consumer Product Safety Commission issues recalls for dangerous products. The problem is, many consumers of those products never find out about it. And, as consumers, who among us has the time to research every product to make sure there’s no recall?

That’s the beauty of automatic alerts. It so happens the CPSC offers automatic alerts via e-mail. Here’s how to sign up:

1. Go to the CPSC email alerts page (https://www.cpsc.gov/cpsclist.aspx).
2. Enter your e-mail address.
3. Click the button for “All recalls only (list name: recalls)”
4. Click the “Subscribe” button.

You can look up recalls at www.recalls.gov

The most recent recall headlines include:

• Coffee Makers Recalled by Sears Due to Fire and Burn Hazards
• Stroller Activity Bars Recalled by International Playthings Due to Choking Hazard
• IMS Recalls Car Chargers Used With Halogen Spotlights Sold at Sears and K-Mart Due to Fire and Burn Hazards

To report a dangerous product or a product-related injury, call CPSC’s hotline at (800) 638-2772 or visit CPSC’s web site at www.cpsc.gov/talk.html.

Clark Howard, the Atlanta-based consumer advocate and host of the Clark Howard Show, has forgotten more about travel bargains than most people would know in a lifetime.

On his radio show, he recently gave this advice: When booking a hotel room to attend a meeting or convention, don’t tell the customer representative that you’re attending an event.

Turns out, you’ll get a *worse* rate most of the time than the average consumer. Convention organizers usually tell you to mention that you’re booking a room to attend an event, presumably to get group-discount rate. But the truth is, at least sometimes, the organization pushes the higher room rates in exchange for freebies and discounts organizers get, such as a break on the price of meeting and conference rooms.

“The reality is, hotels rip people off who are attending a meeting or convention with hugely expensive rates they pretend are a discount,” Howard said on his show.

Most of the time, you’ll be better off using the usual tactics to get a price break on a room, such as using Hotwire.com and Priceline.com, Howard said. Information at BiddingForTravel.com can help you better bid on rooms with Priceline.com. Of course, you might get a better rate staying at a nearby hotel, rather than the hotel hosting the conference.

If your company is paying for your accommodations, maybe you don’t care. But when the money’s coming from your household budget or your small-business budget, lower rates can matter a lot.

Price-comparison Web sites, sometimes called shop-bots, are a great tool for the savvy consumers. At places like Google Product Search, MySimon and PriceGrabber, you can instantly compare prices for a wide host of products.

A new Web site, launched this week by my friend Edgar Dworsky of ConsumerWorld.org, is called Deal Alerter. It goes one step further than the shop-bots. Here’s a description from a news release:

Bargain hunters no longer have to repeatedly check and recheck prices for the same item, such as a particular flat panel TV, GPS, or digital camera. Deal Alerter does it for them automatically. It then emails an alert to the shopper when the item they want to buy drops to the price they want to pay. Here is how it works:

1. The shopper picks an item and checks its current price range.
    
   
2. If prices seem too high, he or she can set a lower target
   price.
   
3. The site automatically rechecks store prices daily, and then
   sends the shopper an email alert if prices drop to or below their
   target price.

When you try it out, you’ll see Deal Alerter is built using the PriceGrabber shop-bot. For some reason, my eye had trouble finding the link “Set Price Alert.” But it’s there. It’s just above the “User Reviews” with the red stars. You’ll have to register an e-mail address with PriceGrabber to use Deal Alerter.

A site that offers free online access to national magazines seems too good to be true for consumers and a nightmare for publishers. But that’s what is happening at mygazines.com. It offers free .pdf versions of popular magazines. For how long, who knows? I’m no lawyer, but it seems to be a clear copyright infraction.

While we here at Spending Smart love a bargain, and the word “free” makes us giddy, we would encourage you to use this site to check out magazines – like you were browsing at a newsstand – and subscribe to ones you like. The mygazines Web site has been quite sluggish recently, as word gets out about it and traffic slows the site.

For spending money smarter, here are some magazine subscription suggestions:

• Consumer Reports
• Money
• SmartMoney

Sunday’s Spending Smart newspaper column was about setting goals. That can be a real yawner of a topic – although it shouldn’t be. For those of you in white-collar jobs who handle budgets or manage people, could you imagine your boss just saying, “Heck with creating objectives, just wing it. We’ll just hope our department makes a profit.”

Yet, so many of those same people don’t create money goals for their own household.

One of the biggest benefits of creating goals is how it can change our perspective – let us see the forest for the trees, to use a tired cliché. In real life, that allows us to tell ourselves no. That’s important nowadays with so much marketing bombarding us daily, fueling our wants. Goals remind us there’s something we want more than the tempting purchase right in front of us.

Do you have written financial goals?

Standard advice when renting a car is to say “no” to the insurance, called the loss damage waiver. That’s the insurance they try so hard to sell you at the pickup counter. The reason is that you probably already have accident coverage from your regular auto-insurance policy and/or the credit card you used to rent the vehicle.

That advice is still good, but car-rental companies are increasingly adding new fees when one of their cars is damaged, according to the August issue of Money magazine. Your insurer or credit-card company might balk at covering them. They include:

• Administrative fees to process claims.
• Diminished value to reflect the lower resale value of a vehicle with an accident history.
• Loss of use to cover missed revenue while the vehicle was being repaired.

The advice to say no is still good because even if you get stuck paying for these, you’re on the hook for a relatively small portion of the damage. And, statistically, accidents are pretty rare.

This goes back to the Golden Rule of Insurance: Buy insurance to protect yourself from financial disaster, not small nuisance expenses.

And how are you supposed to pay for those unexpected nuisance expenses? An emergency fund, of course. Having a stash of cash, what they used to call a rainy day fund, is essential. That’s because it will rain. It’s just a matter of when.

On Sunday, I wrote in my Spending Smart column about whether satellite radio is a good value, especially for those who are cash-strapped nowadays. So far, I’ve gotten less hate e-mail from satellite-radio fans than I anticipated. However, I did get a note from a public-relations representative for Slacker.com.

In the column, I talked about how a digital music player is a good substitute for a lot that satellite radio (Sirius XM) offers. Slacker.com is a part-software/part-hardware solution. While the concept is really cool and received rave reviews, its debut device did not. See the Cnet.com review here, for one.

Slacker.com is an online radio service, similar to Pandora.com, which I recommended in the column. You can listen to different genres of music and then customize your radio stations over time by voting on songs, either approving them or disapproving them. But Slacker also has an iPod-like hardware device, a suped-up mp3 player that wirelessly – when it’s in range of a wireless Internet signal – updates your personalized radio stations and stores them on the device so you no longer need to have Internet access. You could hook the device to your car radio station through a direct wire or with an FM transmitter, thereby taking your personalized radio stations with you.

Unfortunately, the device itself apparently doesn’t fully live up to the great concept, according to reviews. Besides being relatively expensive, it apparently has poor battery life, some unintuitive controls and occasionally jumpy playback. However, it received positive reviews too, like this one. And next-generation devices from Slacker might be improved, as they often are with electronics. Listening to music at your computer from Slacker.com works well, and it’s free.

I don’t have a Slacker device and I’m probably not qualified to review one, which is why I defer to others for that.

I should mention that with the new ability of iPhones and Ipod Touches to download programs, Pandora.com is among the applications. You can listen to your customized radio stations when you’re within range of wireless Internet services (wi-fi), or in the case of the iPhone, a wireless data connection. That still gives Slacker the advantage of not needing a wireless connection at all to play songs.

Anyway, the point is, if you can’t stand broadcast radio, there are many options today for music in the car and at home. Satellite radio is just one of them.