What you drive determines how much it will cost you.  Drive a compact or mid-size instead of a SUV and you can easily save several thousand dollars per year.  How much would that reduce your financial and relationship stress?

We tend to take cars and car payments for granted.  They are a necessary evil.  Right?  No, you don’t have to have big car payments.  Buy a cheaper car or buy a pre-owned car.  See our other article on saving money on cars.

Look at your current budget and see what difference you could make today by switching to a lower cost vehicle or two.  Costs include the price of depreciating value of the car, insurance, maintenance, gasoline, and miscellaneous related vehicle costs.

Runzheimer International provided the following estimated costs of ownership for select 2006 model cars and SUV’s.  This assumes you buy a new car every three years and drive 15,000 miles per year.  This is quite typical.  All these numbers are now too low by $1,000 to $2,000 dollars with the sky high price of gasoline.

Spend time with Consumer Reports autos website to find the better cars to buy.  Try this car auction site and this auto auction site for huge savings on repossessed and seized vehicles.

Now here is the big secret to car buying:

Car buying is generally not a logical process.  Car buying is an emotional process.  And the dealers love you for that.

The moment you can take your emotion out of your car purchase, you can get the dealer out of your head and the banker out of your pocket.  That’s it.

Here are 35 more great ways to save money.