Want a good deal on a used car? Technology at your fingertips lets you research the financially least desirable vehicles and make a beeline for them.

A pair of recent reports from Kelley Blue Book and Automotive Lease Guide point out which cars have great resale value after three or five years. Those are the cars you wish you owned already, but they're not the ones you should be buying used. Instead, read from the bottom of list upward.

Here's the premise: Virtually all cars are reliable and safe. Not that there aren't differences, but pre-millennial participants in the Reliability Special Olympics, such as Fiat, Yugo, and Sterling (the British Honda), have long since departed our shores. What's left is at least decent.

If you're buying used and want maximum bang for the buck, follow these five rules:

KBB.com says the top cars for resale value now, retaining about half their value after three years, are the Acura TSX, BMW 5 Series, Honda Civic, Lexus IS, Mini Cooper, Pontiac Solstice, Scion tC, Toyota Prius, Volkswagen GTI, and Volkswagen Eos. Not a bad car among the bunch. But a $30,000 TSX will set you back $15,000 when you're buying it used, whereas the worst cars are worth a quarter to a third of their initial prices after three years.

Instead of that TSX, how about a Ford Taurus, which would be worth $10,000 now? Or a Dodge Stratus? Or a Buick Century or Regal? Or a Ford Focus?

A while back, my in-laws bought out the lease on a Buick Regal with a landau top (they liked it) that the leasing company was about to take a bath on. It's relatively reliable and safe, and no teenager would be caught dead in a Regal, which makes the Buick an ideal car for a teenager: He or she would drive the car only under duress. That's the kind of car you should be looking for, too, rather than a brand new Infiniti G35 or Toyota RAV4. Continued...

Tech options on used cars come cheap. They often depreciate at higher rates than the cars themselves. On a three- or four-year-old car, a $2,000 navigation system will add less than $500 to the cost. Even at that, the car might stick around on the lot longer than average, so the seller could be more willing to dicker on price.

With the memory of high gas prices still with us, prices for SUVs and pickups are depressed. If you're driving less than 10,000 miles a year, the extra money you spend on gas for your SUV will be more than made up for by the vehicle's discount. Used pickup truck prices are especially low right now.

If you're intent on getting good value, look for cars with low resale potential. Cross-reference that against reliability records. Try Consumer Reports, even though you have to pay for access to the site. Knock cars off you list that have much-worse-than-average repair records. A vehicle with merely a worse-than-average record is close to the reliability of the best cars from a decade ago.

Among the car types I'd recommend are virtually all medium and large Ford, GM, and Chrysler cars. Also take a look at Korean cars; they've made incredible strides in reliability and desirability. The Kia Rio is right at the bottom of resale-value rankings. It's not that bad. Or you can find a 2003 Hyundai Accent for around $8,000, maybe $6,000 through a private sale. And the Ford Focus is a pretty decent small car that hasn't held up well in resale value.