Cutting down on wasteful spending and maximizing savings and investments can give a surprising boost to your personal finances. Some money-management strategies, from the March Consumer Reports magazine:

Pay extra on your mortgage. Just $50 a month can shave almost $40,000 from the $164,000 in interest you'd pay for each $100,000 you borrow on a 30-year mortgage at 8.02 percent.

Buy a used car instead of a new model.

Save the maximum possible in a 401(k) plan if you're eligible.

Review insurance and focus on protecting against a broad range of risks. Raise deductibles and drop coverage you don't need.

Pay off credit-card debt.

Use medical and dependent care flexible spending accounts at work.

Don't keep too much cash in checking or savings accounts that earn little interest - move some into higher-paying money market accounts.

Mortgage trends on Net

Prospective home buyers or refinancers can get a better idea of when to lock down their mortgage rate by following daily mortgage movements and trends on the Internet.

Analysts with Mortgage Market Information Services (MMIS) provide financing information at the company's home page, http://www.interest.com

''Our different pages walk people through all the different loan programs and provide them with the use of payment calculators to figure out for themselves the program best suited for their specific needs,'' said Keith Kubik, with the Chicago firm.

MMIS also provides 26 directories of lenders who specialize in specific mortgage needs. Users can fill out a form online that is automatically faxed to lenders for information.

Europe still no bargain

The much ballyhooed rise in the dollar in recent months might be making Europe more affordable for vacationers. But it remains no bargain.

''It's still not cheap in Europe at all,'' said Rolfe Shellenberger of Runzheimer International, a travel consulting firm.

Despite the dollar's sharp rise the past seven weeks, experts note it remains far below mid-1980s levels. Against the German mark, the dollar is up about 21 percent since its low in 1995, for example, but it's still down about 50 percent from its 1985 high.

Be careful funding adult kids

You're lucky and hard-working enough to call yourself wealthy? Be smart enough not to give too much to your kids.

That's the message in The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy, by Thomas Stanley and William Danko, former and current professors of marketing at the State University of New York at Albany (Longstreet Press; $22).

Help children with college tuition, the authors say. Help them start a business. But paying out cash to maintain an adult lifestyle - a house, cars, vacations - is poison. The authors call such aid ''the single most important factor that explains the lack of productivity among the adult children of the affluent.''

Tax refund equals free loan

Would you be willing to lend the IRS money interest-free?

If your are getting a refund, that is just what you have done.

A savings strategy: File a new Form W4 with your employer to trim tax withholding. And if you really count on that once-a-year check, arrange with your bank to transfer an amount equal to the withholding cutback from each paycheck you deposit to an interest-bearing account.

- Compiled from Enquirer news services