When my parents bought their first home in 1954 they paid $8,000 for it. Today, you can’t even buy a new car for $8,000, and you certainly can’t buy a new SUV for $8,000.

Or, maybe you can!

With gas prices headed toward $5 a gallon and a barrel of oil up three and a half dollars in a single day (again!) as I write this, many people have discovered that they cannot unload their formerly beloved Sport Utility Vehicles at any price. Vehicles that once cost over 30K new off the lot now have trade-in values of pennies on the dollar. If you’ve already tried to trade down to something more fuel efficient, and you still owe on your auto loan on the SUV, you know what I’m talking about.

It’s depressing.

Not to worry. A nice SUV is good for lots of other things besides driving. You just have to use your imagination and go with the flow. Get your bike down from the garage rafters, buy a public transit pass, and consider the following ideas for that beautiful gas hog:

1)      Use it for a vacation home. Around here, a cabin on the lake rents for upwards of $600 a week. That’s a mere fraction of even the highest SUV payment. Park your baby somewhere beautiful, plug in one of those mini-fridges, and watch the sunset for a truly creative and economic stay-cation. When your week at the lake is up, rent your SUV out to friends and family members and use the income to pay off that loan and get the hybrid your budget craves.

2)      Put your mother-in-law in it. Building codes often prohibit separate mother-in-law quarters on your residential property, but you can park your SUV anywhere you want in your own yard. Get one of those prefab, concrete porch stoops, push it up to the hatch back door, plant some flowers, and presto! Instant mother-in-law apartment!

3)      Turn it into performance art. Apply for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Fill your SUV with foam peanuts and set fire to it in front of Ford Motor Company in Detroit while pretty girls dressed in Japanese “Hello Kitty” outfits dance around it and roast marshmallows. Use the NEA grant money to pay off the loan, and film the performance with your mini-cam to put up on www.YouTube.com for passive income. Retire early, drive a Tesla.

4)      Give it away at the office Secret Santa exchange this December. This only works if you don’t actually commute to work in it. If your coworkers are on to you, you might have to make your spouse do it.

5)      Drive it to New Orleans, donate it as temporary housing. Take the tax write off for a charitable contribution, and if your loan company comes after you, call the local papers and make sure it looks like they don’t care about hurricane victims, at all, not even a little bit.

These are just a few, simple ideas to get you started. I’m sure that with a little effort you can think up lots more. Probably readers of this blog have some they will post for you free of charge. Make a game of it. Get your friends to help you brainstorm other creative ways to use their SUVs too.

When you get to 100 creative ways to use your SUV, write and publish these ideas as a book: 100 Ways to Use Your Useless SUV. In fact, if you go to www.lifetips.com and join as an author, they will publish your book for you (as long as it is 100 tips on, you know, anything) and sell it in bookstores and at Amazon and cut you $2 per copy sold, which really isn’t that bad for something your friends actually did most of the work on. Keep all the money for yourself.

Retire early. Drive a Tesla.