There are several ways to turn an old car into money depending on your level of automotive expertise, the age of the vehicle and a few other factors. 

Sell Your Car

If you're comfortable working on your car or if you have friends and family members with automotive inclinations, you could consider fixing your car up and selling it. However, this isn't always an option, particularly if the car has a bad transmission or engine and a replacement would cost more than the value of the vehicle.

Sell Parts

Alternately, you can sell the car's parts. If you sell parts, however, you might end up spending a lot of time with your old car. On the plus side, you'll likely learn a lot about the vehicle, and you can use some of this new knowledge to keep your next vehicle in good repair.

Car Donation

Car donation is a rapidly growing trend. If your vehicle won't start, you might consider looking online for a donation center near you. There are a few caveats; you might have to pay to have the car towed, and if you have an older vehicle, it might not be valuable enough to donate. Nevertheless, you can certainly consider vehicle donation as a potential option. When you donate your vehicle, you'll get a certificate or a receipt that shows the value of your donation. You can claim the donation on your taxes as a charitable contribution to save some serious money.

Junk Yards

Junk yards offer another convenient way to get rid of your old vehicle and make a few dollars. Some junk yards will pay for old vehicles according to a cost schedule. They make money off of old, non-working vehicles by stripping them down, selling their parts and recycling their bodies.

Cash for Cars

Finally, you can look online for a service that tows your vehicle away for cash. These services often provide a good price for older vehicles and are an especially attractive option if you don't want to spend much time getting rid of your old vehicle. Make sure to confirm your payment before agreeing to any terms.

For any of the options listed above, you will need your vehicle's title, mileage and VIN number. Depending on the age and mileage of your vehicle, you might not get too much money, but evaluate all of your options before you junk your vehicle to make sure that you're not throwing money away.

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Dane Thompson is a car nut, bargain hunter, and auto blogger. He recommends Craig’s Cash for Junk Cars if you’re thinking about getting money for your vehicle.

I drive about 50 miles a day to work and back, round trip. Since I drive a lot, last year, I bought a Prius using a couple useful websites and steps. I mentioned how to get the most mileage of your car in a previous post. Today I'd like to share with you my best way of finding the cheapest gas that goes with your car with a combustion engine.

It's not too hard to find the cheapest gas in your area with Internet at your fingertip. For example, websites like GasBuddy or GasPriceWatch simply shows you gas prices given a zip code. It's cool, it's convenient, but it could be better. How can it be easier?

Imagine you will be on a route and on the way you'd like to re-fuel your car. Don't you want to know whereabout is the best to make a stop at a gas station? FuelMyRoute can help. Instead of assuming you know the location around which you'd search for gas, FuelMyRoute helps you look for the cheapest gas price along a specified route with a start point and end point. It'll search for gas stations along your route for you within proximity.

Once searched, you'll easily see the lowest, average, highest gasoline price along with your driving direction. The lowest price is visualized on a map of driving direction as seen above. To give it a try you may go visit FuelMyRoute.com and see for yourself.

FuelMyRoute was created by Marcus Christie who thought of this idea in 2008 when he was planning a family vacation to Disney World in Orlando, FL.. Yesterday, I caught Marcus via email and asked him what's on his mind to make his free service even better. Apparently he's working on an Andoid version of the service these days. Here's what he said:

"Currently I'm working on an Android app that will provide the same functionality as the website.  I don't have any near term plans for improving the website, except that some of the things that I am planning on doing for the Android app will likely also benefit the website. For example, I'm planning on some performance improvements that will also benefit the website and I'm also looking into increasing the amount and quality of gas price data I have to search over."

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by Charles Gwa

The state I live in - California - is averaging the highest gas price per gallon in the continental U.S. these days, according to the Gas Price Chart available on GasBuddy.com where you can check out the average gas of your area down to the county level. As the price at the gas pump rises steadily exceeding $4.25 per gallon in my area as of May 2012, I'm all into knowing ways to save money on gas.

There are some general ways to save on gas usage - by driving less or carpooling more, whenever possible. To drive less, try to combine multiple grocery trips into one with better grocery shopping planning ahead so you don't waste gas by doing more in a single trip. When you carpool with someone else, you're also saving gas on a per person basis.

If you absolutely need to drive a car, consider to review your driving habit (I know it's kind of very hard) as it will affect your gas mileage per gallon. The optimized speed for the maximized highway MGP depends on the model of your car. However, in general, if you're on a highway going over speed limit, you're absolutely not getting the best MPG and may be off by five percentage, ten percentage, or even more. It might be too trivial to remember the exact speed to drive for getting the best MPG, but if you can reduce aggressive speeding and don't drive over highway speed limit, which you shouldn't anyway, you'll be stretching your gas mileage in the right direction.

If you tend to do brisk acceleration, stop doing that. Some people say you may be able save a gallon of gas a week by not doing rapid acceleration on the road. A test shows the difference in fuel consumption between slow acceleration and brisk acceleration may not be that much unless you're driving a hybrid, but avoid the possibility that you will need to brake does help a lot in terms of saving gas.

Remember to keep tires properly inflated. If tires are under inflated, they may cost you up to 4% of fuel efficiency according to U.S. Department of Energy. On the other hand, over inflated tires may increase blow out risks. You want your tire pressure to just about the manufacture's suggested PSI (pound per square inch) which is available on the sticker on the driver's door side. I recommend using a non-digital air pressure gauge (e.g. a Handheld Dial Tire Air Pressure Gauge) for measuring tire pressure. A non-digital air pressure gauge does not require battery thus it is always ready for measuring tire pressure when you need it. Besides, non-digital air pressure gauges tend to cost less than the digital ones. American Tire has an online Tire Pressure Gas Mileage calculator that tells how much is low pressure tire costing you.w

Lastly, evan you can't possibly avoid using gas, consider this: When I pay at the pump, if I chose to pay with a credit card, I always opt for using the card that gives me some money back on gas purchase. For example, the AE card I have gives me 3% cash rebate on every dollar I spend at any gas pump. You may consider the same approach because every little bit of saving counts.

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by Charles Gwa

This month marks my first anniversary of owning a Prius HB II that I bought for $22,188 (before tax). If I were to do it again this year, I'd follow a simple three-stops (2 online and 1 offline) shopping process:

1. Go to TRUECar.com for a price reference.
   
2. Sign up to CarWoo.com to get three or more real offers a day. Pick one.
   
3. Go to the dealer to complete the transaction and drive away with the car.
   

I concluded that my last year's car hunting ended with high satisfaction, measured by how little time I wasted in negotiations and other nonsense. In my case, that year-ago car buying experience wasted record-low time in my entire car-shopping experiences that I can recall, and beat my expectation of the time it took to close the deal. In fact, I spent more time in the final paperwork process (in which I had to deny all the warranty up-sale as usual) than spending on confirming the offered car price. It took me one and a half hours on the closing paperwork; before that, I spent half an hour on confirming the pre-agreed non-negotiable price and checking out the car.

In the simple three-stops process I outlined, the first step of visiting TRUECar.com is not necessary, but just for reassurance for a later time that you'll be given a price range that is reasonable. TRUECar.com gives you a clear idea of how much the car you're interested should be priced in your local region, which is usually lower than the invoice. According to TRUECar.com, if I were offered $22,555 on a Prius II, the price would be reasonably acceptable.

The second step is to head to CarWoo.com, and sign up for their online service to get quote by email from dealers. I was a bit skeptical at first about this service that I had never used and never heard of before. I signed up anyway. After telling CarWoo the specific car I was seriously interested in buying, within 24 hours, in my case, I got more than 3 offers via emails from local dealers. Among them, I chose the lowest offered price which also happenned to be near my work place.

KZ, the salesman, set up a time with me to pay him and the car a visit. Upon arriving to the dealership, I checked the car that he had pulled out from their fleet and set aside for me to inspect, re-iterated the offered price, but I told him I'd be back the next day to complete the transaction. You don't want to rush through as if it was too smooth to be true. However, the very next day I was even more sure about the offer and we completed the transaction in a 2 hours time frame.

You are probably not aware that the car price of the same car of the same dealer may vary depending which representative you work with. The sales representative may belong to a dealer's traditional sales department, fleet department, or newly established internet department. It is the person in the internet department who may potentially offer you the best offer at the dealership. Using CarWoo helps you to reach out to those representatives dedicated in the internet channel. Or more precisely speaking, they can now reach out to you.

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by Charles Gwa