Free cars and and at least three legal ways to get one

My folks, who don't drive as much as they used to, recently decided to give my son the keys to a 21-year-old farm pickup truck they once used to take him on camping trips when he was little.

He's really happy about that. Besides the memories that are involved, the pickup will handle northeast Kansas winter driving challenges better than his Miata. And my parents and I are happy for him because free is a tough price to beat, especially when used car prices are rising.

Auto industry trade publications report that last month's Cash for Clunkers program cut the heart out of the normal seasonal flow of used cars to dealers' lots. That puts more pressure on dealers to sell new cars. It also hurts their profits because, counterintuitive as it might seem, dealers make bigger profits selling used cars than new ones.

But none of that answers another question; why pay anything if you don't have to? There are at least three ways to get a car for free without risking jail time.

You can accept one as a gift from a relative, friend or even an impulsive celebrity. That's hard to plan on, of course. You can go to work for someone who gives you a company car to use. Good luck trying that in today's job market, even if the recession is supposed to be ending.

Or you can go into advertising. There are companies that will either give you a free car emblazoned with their clients' ad messages or pay you to have yours decked out with the ad message and then drive your mobile billboard around town. Read the fine print before you sign anything though. The deals vary widely.

Financial self-help guru Dave Ramsey's organization insists there is another way to get a free car too. Buy the best used car that you can afford for cash. Stash the payments you otherwise would be making into a savings account. Use that cash and your trade-in to trade up in a couple of years. Repeat as needed. This isn't truly free, of course, but it is very thrifty.

Finally, before you do anything, do the math. As Edmunds.com senior editor Karl Brauer points out, keeping even a relative gas guzzler can be thriftier than borrowing to buy a fuel sipper.

Cash for clunkers - you can't just go in and kick the tires

Unloading that beat-up late '90s Ford Explorer or other gas guzzler in the government's new Cash for Clunkers program may be a lot easier if you have a calculator, Internet access and a flexible schedule.

Basic rules are already posted on the program's official www.cars.gov Web site. But some auto industry analysts say waiting until about July 23 might get you the best deal. That's the the National Highway Traffic Administration's deadline for coming up with detailed rules spelling out how auto dealers get paid for fronting us $3,500 to $4,500 and making sure our clunkers actually make it to the scrap yard and not some underground resale market. Some dealers may be more cautious until they know those details

But you may not want to wait too long either. The program is scheduled to end Nov. 1 or sooner if buyers hit a 250,000 sales limit set by federal spending caps.

Meantime, Detroit, its competitors and camp followers are revving up some sales pitches now. General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Nissan and Hyundai already have added Cash for Clunkers sections to their Web sites. Other auto makers and related outfits such as finance companies seem likely to follow.

Financing the new fuel-sipper you buy with your clunker cash gets interesting too.

Lenders to auto buyers are just as antsy about loan quality as home lenders. According to some indicators, it takes maybe a 720 to 760 point credit score now to get the same comfortable interest rates that a 600 to 700 point score fetched six months ago.

700 points is going to be stretch for a bunch of us with foreshortened income prospects. Outfits such as MoneyNowUSA.com, which collects loan applications online and coordinates them with payday and other lenders, offer to seek loans for borrowers with scores ranging as low as the upper 400 to low 500 range. Rates depend on the lender who agrees to actually make the loan, but won't be cheap. Or you may need a co-signer.