Here’s how:

• First, find the best price offered by dealers on your favorite car-buying website. Get both a price for the car and a detailed “out-the-door” price, including motor vehicle department fees, sales taxes and any dealer charges for documentation, etc. Then keep that number in your hip pocket.

• On the weekend before the last 3, 4 or 5 consecutive weekdays of the month, check dealer inventories online. Many stores list it there. Choose 5 or 6 stores (ideally, but not necessarily, with cars you’d buy if the price were right), even if some are 50 or more miles away. More remote dealers may see you as a sale they’d never make and sell at a better price than they’d offer their neighbors.

• Call their Internet sales managers on the 1st morning if there are 3 consecutive weekdays, the 2nd morning if there are 4, the 3rd if there are 5. Describe the car you want in detail, say you’re ready to buy by month-end, that you’re contacting a limited number of dealers to get price proposals and you’d like to get one from that store. That you need both the price of the car and an itemized out-the-door price (with the details listed above) by phone or email by 11:00 AM the next morning. (Be sure they know your location, so they can figure the sales tax correctly.)

• Say you’ll call all responders the next afternoon, tell them the best out-the-door price and give them one shot at beating it. (It’s none of their business where it came from.) You’re ready to buy, and you want someone to knock your socks off at month-end. But you won’t buy from anyone who doesn’t participate from the beginning.

• The next morning call those you haven’t heard from by 11AM, tell them you have proposals from other dealers and you’re waiting for their response. If any responses have been incomplete, call and ask for the missing info. Call everyone that afternoon with the best out-the-door offer. If the initial o-t-d price from the online car-buying site is the best Round 1 offer, use that price in those calls. (When you’re eliminating the cost of the middleman, that won’t happen often. But it could happen.)

• The store offering the best o-t-d price wins. Ask the winner to confirm all the numbers via email because you hate surprises, even small ones. Say you’re looking forward to giving that store the highest scores in the customer satisfaction questionnaire. Make an appointment to sign the papers and pick up the car. Finally, as a courtesy, call the other dealers to thank them for participating. Learn More =>