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Today's show featured "Best Of Clark" repeats from recent shows

Over the past 5 or 6 years, there's just been one deal after another when it comes to buying an automobile. It goes back to the months after 9/11 when GM tried to jumpstart sales with offers of 0% financing for 5 years. Other automakers quickly followed with similar deals. But now people aren't buying cars because of the fallout from the stock and real estate markets. Overall the industry is having dismal sales results. So that means that you have so much bargaining power right now that it's not even funny. Yet 2/3 of consumers squander that power by not doing the right things.

What should you be mindful of when you go to buy a car? First, do research online before you buy. Check Consumer Reports and sites like KelleyBlueBook.com and Edmunds.com to find out about reliable cars that won't need much maintenance. Second, arrange for financing in advance before you get to the dealership. Credit unions offer interest rates on car loans that can be 1 to 3 percent lower than other lenders. You may also want to check online lenders. Even your auto insurer may be able to give you a competitive interest rate. Whatever you do, don't go with a traditional bank or dealer financing. Also, don't tell the dealer you're a cash buyer or credit union customer because they'll factor that into the price in a negative way. Finally, buy your car before you get to the dealership. By this, Clark means you should avoid going to the dealer and negotiating the purchase of your car or you'll face "the grind." The grind is when the salesperson says he or she will go talk to their manager about getting you the best deal. Instead they go watch TV for 5 minutes and come back and tell you that the manager couldn't help out with a good rate despite their best efforts on your behalf. This is total baloney. When it comes to price, you want to stay in your ballpark, not theirs. After all, they have home field advantage because they sell cars everyday while you may only buy a handful of times over the years. As a final thought, you may also want to purchase through a warehouse club if you're a member. There you'll enjoy a set price and no haggling.

Clark often confuses people with his talk about choice in schools because they think he's getting political. But he sees it as an issue that's simply about giving every child an opportunity to succeed -- regardless of their family's socioeconomic background. Monopoly schools and arbitrary zoning either sentence kids to a stinking school or reward them with a good one based on where they live. That's pretty much the norm across the country. But some states like Arizona have been very innovative with allowing school choice and having an active charter school movement. Clark grants that there have been financial scandals in some of the Arizona charter schools, yet he thinks they're on the right track. He also likes the idea of vouchers, which are like gift certificates where you take the public money that would have been spent on a student and give it to them to subsidize private school tuition.

Parents who home-school their kids really impress Clark. There are nearly 2 million kids who receive this kind of education. Clark admits that he doesn't have the intestinal fortitude to home-school his own brood! Yet home-schooled kids are usually overachievers. Colleges once shunned them because they have non-traditional transcripts and grades. Now The Washington Post reports that nearly 85 percent of colleges have formal evaluation policies to come up with a class rank of sorts for home-schooled kids. There's even a whole cottage industry of learning materials that have sprung up around parents who home-school. Clark sees the teaching materials for sale at stores in August and September. With home life being such an important factor in a child's education, Clark wants to salute parents who home-school.

More and more baby boomers are experiencing premature hearing loss from exposure to loud sounds. The unfortunate thing is that many of them may be freaked out by hearing aids and are not willing to use them. Clark knows someone who's slightly younger than himself who has enjoyed loud music all her life. Finally it got to the point that she couldn't hear conversation clearly. When she finally decided to get a hearing aid, it dramatically improved her life.

There are many kinds of hearing aids and many different price ranges from really inexpensive to several thousand dollars per ear! Clark has earned the ire of a lot of professional audiologists who hate him for telling people to go to hunting shops and buy devices for hunters that are essentially hearing aids. You'll pay a few hundred dollars -- a fraction of the cost you'd pay to get one from an audiologist. The audiologists complain that someone could mask a problem that may need serious medical treatment by getting such a hearing aid. So there's a definite caveat to Clark's advice. He once got one of his relatives a cheap hunter's hearing aid. His relative was as unhappy with the cheap one as she was with the one that cost thousands of dollars. There's obviously no magic bullet here. Clark remembers the days when there used to be a disposable hearing aid device called the SongBird that retailed for $49. Unfortunately it's no longer on the market. But if you travel overseas you'll find that hearing aids aren't regulated by the government. So that you means you can go to a drug store and buy one over the counter for a fraction of the cost you'd pay in the United States.

The elderly are collectively sitting on $14 trillion dollars in savings. That means they have a big, fat bull's-eye on them for con artists to hit. Christopher Cox, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, is a libertarian who wants the government to stay out of people's lives. It goes without saying that he is generally skeptical of interference. But he's so disturbed by the con artists ripping off old people that he's convened a conference of the feds and the state regulators to fight back. Did you know that sales people are actually going to presentations to learn how to rip off the elderly with outright fraud and bad investments? "Every rock that we turn over seems to have a bug or a worm crawling out underneath," Cox recently told The Washington Post. "In each of the sweeps we conducted, we found significant fraud."

Clark is very upset about all the newspaper ads he sees for notes that promise to pay up to 14 percent interest. Seniors who fall for these notes probably won't see one single penny. Then there's the free meal seminar tactic and phony credentials that Clark has talked about so often. The latest twist now involves marketing organizations that print up investing guide books. These books feature an author's name and a picture of whatever financial guy pays them to have his headshot on the jacket. So the end result is that the elderly are being pitched by people who look like they're respected advisors and published authors on the topic of investing. The phony tactic literally makes it seem like someone "wrote the book" on investing! On a related note, what do you think is the most common area where seniors get ripped off because they follow bad financial advice? Annuities. No surprise there if you're a longtime listener of the show. Clark now calls annuities "the four letter word of investing."