Anyone chafing at the $50-plus it now takes to fill up a car will chuckle at this latest bit of data. According to the U.S. Bureau of Analysis, Americans spent more on gasoline than on vehicles and parts in May and June of this year, when gas prices were reaching new records.

That's the first time that's happened in 26 years. The last time gas exceeded cars and their parts as a percentage of spending was in January 1982. One analyst cited in news reports noted dryly that the trends of higher gas with lower car and truck sales had finally crossed.

U.S. refiners will likely pay an average of $111.11 a barrel for imported oil this year, compared with $67.02 a barrel last year, and $27.21 a barrel in 2002, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)

Meanwhile, the auto industry is looking at its worst year since 1993. As of August 1 when companies reported data, sales of cars and light trucks fell 29% at Chrysler LLC, 26% at GM, 15% at Ford, 12% at Toyota and 1.6% at Honda Motor Co.

Last time this happened I wasn't paying as much attention, being in high school and all. There was an energy crisis triggered by the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, which itself came on the heels of the 1973 Arab oil embargo. I remember the gas lines, but none of the belt-tightening. My mom put gas in my car and paid the household bills.

Ignorance is indeed bliss. Now that I'm in her shoes, I'll have to ask her how she actually managed the last time the economy was in this bad of shape. Something tells me it's going to get a lot worse.

This video has been around for a while but Rob Gruhl does such an excellent job at explaining how to purchase a car that it is well worth your time even if you aren't in the market just yet. Even though the focus of the talk is on how to buy a new car, you can easily adapt most of this advice to the used car hunt as well. I've lamented my last car purchase on WalletPop before and I wish I had watched this video before we set foot in the dealership last year.

My favorite piece of information from this video is to remember that you as the buyer have the power when you go into the dealership. There were numerous times during out purchasing that we thought things were iffy but we didn't walk because we got too attached to the car and forgot that we held the power in the transaction. Something that I don't think most people realize when they go in to purchase a car is that, unless you are buying a first edition Dodge Charger, there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of almost identical cars out there for you to purchase.

I wish we had remembered that when we went shopping, instead I got in the mindset that this is the only one we will ever find in our price range and began justifying this and that to ourselves, eventually purchasing the car and getting suckered into GAP insurance and dealer financing. Both of which we ended up switching within a month and saving a bundle. Remember, "If you're doing it right, you'll feel like an ass."

Check out our previous coverage on "How not to buy a car" by Zac Bissonnette

Even though Fuelly seems to have too many vowels to be a web 2.0 application it has hit the ground running and provides users with a cool new way to track fuel usage. I had previously written about Fuel Frog, which lets you track your gas usage online at each fill up and it does a great job, but Fuelly really raised the bar. Fuelly has added a social aspect to tracking gas mileage by letting you compare your MPG with others driving your car and also with your friends and family to see who is getting the best mileage.

If you can get your friends to start using Fuelly then you'll have more of an incentive to track your gas mileage and be fuel efficient since we all seem to enjoy a little competition. You may find out some interesting stats about your friend's fuel usage while using Fuelly. While I have a fuel efficient car, I tend to drive like I'm trying to put out a fire somewhere while my friends with bigger vehicles are known to drive more like a 90 year old out for a Sunday drive. I can't wait to see who is getting more for their money.

I'm going to take Fuelly for a spin today when I fill up my car, I have fallen behind in my usage of Fuel Frog partly because I am lazy and partly because I couldn't remember the format for tracking it by text message. The competitive angle of Fuelly may be just what I need to stick with tracking my fuel cost and usage better and figuring out how to best budget for my gas needs. No matter how you track your gas consumption doing so is an easy way to empower yourself to watch your finances.



Hat tip to Lifehacker.

Here at WalletPop, we're always trying to give tips on car buying. I offered some advice about how to avoid getting sucked in here, and warned about the dangers of 0% financing here. Now CNNMoney has a great list of 6 things you should never say to a car dealer: never admit to being in love with a car, never say you need a car urgently, never negotiate based on monthly payments, don't hand him the keys to your potential trade-in, don't admit you know nothing about leasing, and don't talk about your credit problem.

This is all great advice, but here's the thing: car dealers spend their lives coming up with ways to sell the most cars for the most possible. If you're looking to buy a car, there's a good chance that you've read only a couple magazine pieces, if that, about how to avoid getting taken. Car dealers are like a mutating virus: find out one way to beat them and they'll come up with others, and they have all the time in the world to dream them up.

My advice: try to do the bulk of your shopping online, and only visit the lot to test-drive a specific car that you've called about -- and make it clear that you don't want to try something else. If they had something else you wanted, it would have shown up in your online search, right? I'm sure plenty of people will disagree with me but I think that your odds of overspending on a car increase if you start test-driving stuff that the dealer -- who doesn't know your budget and wants to make as much money as possible -- suggests.

An unemployed 30-year old German man lit his 1995 BMW on fire to protest high gas prices.

Amazingly, the display did not immediately cause OPEC to increase production and lower prices, so I guess we have to call this effort a failure. I'll sympathize somewhat because gas costs over $9 a gallon in Germany right now, but this is still one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of -- although it did secure the man, whose name has not been made public, his 15 minutes of fame.

Making matters even worse, the Associated Press reports that he doused the car in gasoline first. So apparently the untold story of high gas prices is that not only is driving getting more expensive, but lighting your car on fire because you can't afford gasoline is a considerable hardship for many people.

A better solution: don't light your car on fire, sell it -- trade down to a used sub-compact, or take public transportation and walk - if you're like most people, you could use the exercise.

If achieving financial security is important to you -- and it probably is if you're reading WalletPop -- the absolutely worst source of information is the Madison Avenue marketing genius. If you want to be rich and happy, you would do well to take a sledgehammer to your television.

But even by Madison Avenue standards, the message behind the funny FreeCreditReport.com commercials is bad. Here are the lyrics to catchy song I recently found myself humming:

Well I'm shopping for a new car, which one's me? A cool convertible or an SUV.

Too bad I didn't know my credit was whack, so I driving off the lot in a used sub-compact.

F-R-E-E-E, that spells "free", credit report dot com baby. Saw their ads on my TV. Thought about goin' but was too la~zy.

Now instead of lookin' fly and ridin' phat, my legs are sticking to the vinyl and my posse's getting laughed at.

F-R-E-E-E, that spells "free", credit report dot com baby ...

I've said before that I oppose the idea of car loans for the vast majority of consumers, and this commercial makes abundantly clear why they're so stupid: mortgaging your financial future to prevent strangers from laughing at your posse is ... well let's just say that my thoughts on that one sentence would have to be edited considerably to qualify as merely vulgar.

Here's my advice for car shoppers: pick them like upwardly mobile executives pick wives. First get the car you can afford, and then upgrade when your fortunes are improved.

Fuel efficiency has quickly become the most important factor for many people exploring car purchases, but it may not be as simple as we thought. A car that gets 34 miles per gallon is more fuel efficient than one that gets 32, but it's hardly worth upgrading, right? Well, maybe not.

A paper in Science entitled The MPG Illusion makes the case that the "miles per gallon" label is opaque and difficult for consumers to make calculations with. The authors have set up a one question online quiz to show how difficult it is to make judgments based on the miles per gallon label.

For details on the math behind it, check out this article from the USA Today. But it makes perfect sense: thinking about efficiency in terms of gallons per miles provides a clearer idea of fuel savings.

With all the emphasis on fuel efficiency, car makers and regulators could do a lot to make it easier for consumers to do research and make good decisions about transportation. The basic takeaway from the paper is this: seemingly small increases in fuel efficiency will save you a lot more gas than it intuitively seems like they would.

You probably haven't spent a lot of time pondering what would happen if you lost your rental car keys.

I travel monthly on business. Until my trip to Arizona this month, I hadn't given car keys any thought. Probably I never would have if I hadn't changed my reservation from National to Dollar - something that I did because I was traveling with my 22 year old son. It turns out that car rental companies vary more than a little in their underage driver policies and prices. It also turns out that you have to factor in all kinds of other variables if, for example, you want to rent the car at one airport and return it to another. At best - if the company will do it at all between the two airports that you have in mind - this means an extra fee.

Earlier this week I wrote about the declining value of used SUVs in the face of soaring gas prices -- a 3-year old SUV in 2008 i worth considerably less than a 3-year old SUV in 2007. Luxury might have been the order of the day during the boom times, but now it's all about economy, economy, economy.

A piece in The Wall Street Journal wonders (subscription required) whether the plummeting values of SUVs might make them more appealing now. The idea is that if you drive infrequently, the lower price of an SUV might compensate for the additional money you'll spend on gas.

But I'm not so sure: inventory problems aside, a new SUV is still more expensive than a new economy car. A 2008 Kia Sportage still costs 50% more than a Kia Rio so it isn't like buying a gas pig will save you money. Manheim Consulting reports that average auction prices for used SUVs fell 17.%% in April to $12,500 -- a big drop but you can still get a smaller car for a lot less.

Sorry but buying an SUV isn't -- and never will be -- an economical decision.

With gas prices so high that it seems like it costs $40 just to get to the next gas station, alternatives must be considered. Rollerblades and bicycles aren't good for long distance commutes, and getting a horse might annoy the neighborhood association. One alternative: make your car into a billboard, and get paid hundreds of dollars to promote everything from insurance to energy drinks.

But according to a 2005 Bankrate article, the industry is rife with scams. Never work with a company that asks for an up-front fee, and be wary of big promises: no one is going to give you a car. Be realistic. Given high gas prices, there are a lot of people who would love to turn their cars into billboards, and your chances of getting picked are slim.

But it may be worth a try. One of the reputable companies in this field is FreeCar Media. Here's their pitch:

FreeCar is advertising supported. Advertisers choose the drivers they want based on the information you provide us. You will never have to pay a cent to participate in the program.

When you are chosen, your vehicle will be wrapped in an attractive advertisement and you will get paid up to $900 a month. Most programs average 3 months but some are longer and others shorter.

If you want to give it a shot, fill out the application here, and they'll contact you when they need drivers in your area.

I'm normally a pretty compassionate guy, but this story really brings out my inner schadenfreude.

Those annoying, upwardly mobile, credit-dependent, latte-sipping, people who just had to buy big new SUVs so they could crush smaller cars in accidents and make it harder to see in traffic are finding that their chosen toys of masculinity compensation aren't worth what they thought they would be.

According (subscription required) to the Wall Street Journal, "A three-year-old large SUV today is worth about $2,000 to $3,000 less at trade-in than a three-year-old large SUV would have been in 2007." The culprit, of course, is soaring gas prices. People just can't afford cars that get 12-MPG.

In a wonderful example of the power of good karma, environmentally conscious folks who bought compact cars a few years ago out of concern for the environment sometimes find that they can actually get more for the cars now than they paid!

This may seem obvious, but apparently it isn't: waiting to get more gas for your car until the very last minute is not a good way to save money. It's a stupid way to not save money and maybe waste a ton of money and get stranded somewhere.

The Associated Press reports that "As the national average retail price of gasoline flirts with $4 per gallon, highway assistance programs and area chapters of AAA have noted a rise in drivers running out of gas -- twice as often as last year, in some cases."

People are so reluctant to pay high gas prices that they wait til the last minute but guess what: You still have to buy gas anyway and, with the way prices have been moving lately, the longer you wait the more you pay. Of course, running out of gas can be not only dangerous but it can also make you late for commitments and getting towed or getting service can cost a lot of money. Worse, running close to empty can wear down the fuel pump, requiring expensive repairs. So don't be stupid: fill up your car before you run out of gas. Waiting is false economy.

The quest for signs of intelligent life among American consumers continues ...

I'm not sure why this is considered news. Any adult with common sense knows that when you make claims on your auto insurance policy, your rates are likely to increase. There's very simple logic behind it: Those who have more accidents and cost the insurance companies more should have to pay their fare share through higher rates.

Insurance companies have been gathering data for a zillion years. Every bit of information is tracked and they use it to determine who's a greater risk to them. If the chances are higher that you will cost the insurance company money, then you're going to pay a higher premium.

But here's a little known tidbit mentioned in the video below: Your auto insurance rates might go up even I you don't file a claim for an accident. If you contact your insurance company about an accident you've had, but decide not to file a claim, they might still record the information about the accident in their database. And when it comes time to renew your policy, that accident may affect your premiums.


Tracy L. Coenen, CPA, MBA, CFE performs fraud examinations and financial investigations for her company Sequence Inc. Forensic Accounting, and is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud.

It's pretty well-known that cars are one of the worst investments you can make but, for a select group of small used cars, rising gas prices are sending values upward.

The average sale price for used vehicles in the United States has fallen 2.5% in the past year but, according to the Associated Press, "In the past year, the average used small car price has gone up 2 percent, from $9,278 to $9,470 ... There's evidence that the prices are accelerating, according to recent data from J.D. Power and Associates."

There's wonderful karmic beauty in this: gas pigs who bought environmentally unfriendly cars are now looking to sell because they can no longer afford the gas -- and they're finding that the cars aren't worth nearly as much as they thought they would be. And they're swapping into smaller cars that are more expensive than they used to be.

If you're looking to buy or sell a car, or just do some market research, check out AOL Autos.

I was delighted to read fellow WalletPopper Geoff Williams' post earlier today about a recent article in Forbes: The most expensive cars to repair.

I drive a modest car. A 2004 silver Toyota Rav 4. It ain't fast. It ain't sexy. It's the Mom-mobile, and it was free, thanks to my gracious and beautiful step-mother who insisted I inherit it when she died suddenly of cancer in 2004. Thank you, Babs; I will drive that thing for the next 20 years.

But sometimes I take grief for driving such a blahmobile from friends with flashier rides. This is Los Angeles, after all, ground zero of the hot car cult. So when I read the Forbes' piece, I had to gloat. That pricier cars are more expensive to fix seems obvious. But seeing the facts in print validates my theory that I am being more financially clever than my friends with more money by dint of the car I choose to drive.

Also validated is my sense of modesty and my sense of thrift. Mostly, though, it validates my sense of schadenfruede. Sure, I could lease a nice Beamer like anyone else. But why would I when my car always starts and is cheap to keep maintained?

Recently, a friend who loves luxury cars couldn't start his Mercedes. Big trouble with the starter, which is these days a computer. It was a lot of drama and a lot of money to fix. I pointed out that the starter on my Toyota worked perfectly. And I reminded him that my Toyota engine had never ceased working on an ultra-hot day, as his BMW 5-series engine had a few years earlier. He just glowered at me. It's sort of verboten to point those things out around here.

I'll admit that sometimes I wish I had a flashy, fast car. Speeding up entering the freeways here in Los Angeles I often chant, "Go, little car, go! Wish I had a Beamer..." But that's when the fantasy ends. In the end, I'll stay true to my sensible automobile that always starts, never stalls, and is completely paid for. Which really flies in the face of L.A.'s dominant culture.