Magazines for Less

Though the latter is much more welcome, subscriptions can also be costly — especially if your tastes run to expensive titles, or you have a weakness for the weekly celebrity glossies. Most people know that you can save 60% or more just by subscribing to a magazine rather than buying every issue on the newsstand. But even savvy subscribers can slash another 20% to 30% off that annual bill by shopping around.

Start with the magazine itself. Take a close look at those mail-in subscription inserts that fall out every time you flip a page. While these won't include the rock-bottom rates that can often be found elsewhere, they do provide a benchmark for evaluating other offers. Subscribing for a longer term — say, for two years rather than one — also yields savings.

Next, check out well-known sellers of discounted magazine subscriptions such as Publishers Clearing House and Amazon.com. Since both generate heavy volume, they get generous deals from publishers. But that doesn't mean the big names have the absolute best prices. Less-heralded web sites such as Magazines for Cheap and Discount Magazines also pitch great savings on subscriptions. Browse the selection at Discount Magazines, for example, and you'll come across many subscriptions for only $5.95 a year.

Hands down, some of the thriftiest deals can be found in a surprising place: eBay (EBAY). Sellers offer extremely cheap subscriptions, both in auction and through eBay's "Buy It Now" format, which relies on fixed prices rather than bidding. For $4.88 (flat fee in a Buy It Now listing), you could get a one-year subscription to dozens of magazines including Golf Digest, Premiere, Maxim and Spin. Some sellers even offer the subscriptions in batches based on like content — Lucky, Cosmopolitan, Jane and Allure, for example — for one low price.

The catch with eBay is that instead of the usual wait of six weeks before receiving the first issue, you'll have to cool your heels between two and three months. That's because many of the sellers need to amass a large number of orders before they can forward them to the publication for the heavily discounted rate. And since you can leave feedback for an auction only for 90 days after it ends, make sure you review the seller's track record carefully before making a purchase. Otherwise, you could get stuck with no magazines and no official way to complain.

If your passion is weekly magazines, read the fine print even more carefully. Weeklies aren't sold only in one-year subscriptions. Depending on the company, you might find offers for three, six or even eight months. Figure out the per-issue price, and then base your decision on that figure.