(FORTUNE Magazine) – FOR anyone who still has a job, some idle cash, and a confident feeling about the future, these extended and nasty economic doldrums have at least one bright spot: a profusion of bargains, particularly in luxury goods. Example: the Rolls-Royce. Last year U.S. sales of ultraluxury Rollers skidded 60%. So in December the company began what it calls the Silver Service Lease Program to let you rent a new Silver Spur (list price: $166,300) for $15,000 down and $2,299 a month for 36 months. Alas, there were few takers. So Rolls has sweetened the pot: no down payment at all, and lease terms as long as 60 months. The dealer will even pay the luxury tax that applies to leased cars as well as to those bought outright -- 10% of the price to the extent it exceeds $30,000. ''It's very painful for us,'' sighs a Rolls executive. ''We're just a small company.'' If shopping for luxury goods in hard times strikes you as uncomfortably close to something Marie Antoinette might have done, relax. Not all upscale bargains are the results of the recession that put your next-door neighbor out of work. Thank the luxury tax, for instance, for some of the slackened demand for top-of-the-line cars and boats. Many well-heeled people are so angry that they've simply decided to keep the old yacht and Ferrari until Washington wises up and eliminates the tax. Or regard the sorry, and delightful, state of furs. Prices on full-length mink coats are lower now, some furriers say, than they've been at any time since World War II. A top-quality Blackglama mink now goes for about $3,500, down from $6,500 or more in the late Eighties. Raccoon, starting at about $1,500, and nutria, around $1,000, cost half to a third of what they did five years ago. These declines are not entirely due to white-collar unemployment. Animal-rights activists have succeeded in persuading plenty of folks that wearing pelts is not politically correct, while winters, especially in the Northeast, seem to keep getting warmer. This one-two punch is making many furriers willing to haggle. Finally, it appears that conspicuous consumption is -- at last -- no longer chic. Suzanne Kinsler, president of AutoFacts, an automotive marketing research firm in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, says the current price-cutting spree in luxury cars ''has violated all my preconceived notions about the upper end of the market. To many people, 'luxury' has now become a dirty word.'' But if you're independent enough not to care what the neighbors think, and you have both the means and the inclination to trade up, consider a sampling of the opportunities available:

-- REAL ESTATE. No question about it: This is a buyer's market. Not only are fixed-rate mortgages at 8.9%, but the National Association of Realtors also reports that the median price of a previously owned house is $102,300, down from $103,400 just eight months ago. Although statistics on trading up are in short supply, David Crowe, an economist at the National Association of Homebuilders, estimates that last year about two million families sold their homes in order to buy better ones. The problem for most people is selling the house they already have in order to trade up. When Elliot Feldman, 44, and his wife, Lily, 45, moved from Newton Centre, Massachusetts, to Silver Spring, Maryland, in 1988, they rented out their Massachusetts house instead of selling it. So a year ago, when the couple decided to buy a bigger house in Maryland, they had two homes to put on the market. The Feldmans -- he's an attorney specializing in international law, she's a research director at Johns Hopkins University -- took a big loss on the houses to buy their $685,000 manse in Bethesda last September. This is, alas, typical. Even real estate brokers will tell you that you may have to swallow a hefty loss on your current casa in order to move on to the hacienda of your dreams. Proposed changes in the capital gains tax could help you recoup your losses later, if and when you sell the new house, but the debate in Congress over the Bush Administration's tax bill with the new provisions is only beginning.

Even with such uncertainty hanging over them, homebuyers who sell now to buy something better will probably not be sorry. Robert Cubitto, 41, and Ellen Nadler, 46, both lawyers, have the right attitude: They want to unload the two-bedroom apartment on Manhattan's East Side that Nadler bought for $365,000 in 1986, before they were married. They plan to buy a much larger New York co- op in a swanky neighborhood with a separate dining room, guest room, and maid's room -- the sort of place that would have sold for up to $1 million three years ago -- for ''between $600,000 and $900,000,'' says Cubitto. The couple expects to take a hit of $65,000 or so on their current place but, explains Cubitto, ''We're not thinking of this as an investment. We want a place we'll be comfortable in for the next 20 years.''

-- BOATS. The folks of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, like to call their town the yacht capital of the world, and boat buyers with accents that hark from Kentucky or Kyoto turn up here regularly. But Fort Lauderdale on an auction day is where the luxury tax, 10% on the portion of the price that exceeds $100,000, hits like a hurricane. Says Dennis Haafe, of Admax, one of the nation's biggest yacht brokers: ''Most of our customers are not trading up. They are trading down -- selling a 50-foot boat, buying a 30-footer they can make do with, and putting the difference into other investments.'' According to National Liquidators, whose auctions are a microcosm of the boating world today, everything is going for about half what it would have fetched a few years ago, and sometimes less. For consumers, it's a windfall. Bill Tezak, 50, a real estate developer in Shorewood, Illinois, took two partners to Florida last June and bought a slightly used 50-foot Cheoy Lee sport-fishing boat for $250,000. It was worth $700,000 new and had been recently appraised at $400,000. Says Tezak: ''There's a diminishing number of manufacturers of this kind of boat, so it should increase in value. It may cost 20% more in a few years.''

-- JEWELRY. Everyone remembers the huge run-up in diamond prices in the early 1980s. But on an inflation-adjusted basis, the price per carat of the world's most popular gemstone has not varied much in decades: Today, at $4,600 a carat for a good quality stone, diamonds cost about what they did ten years ago. For a bargain, though, look at tanzanites. Prices of these purplish blue semiprecious rocks, first popularized by Tiffany & Co. back in the late Sixties, have dropped by a third in the past two years because a new mine in Tanzania has increased supply. Prices vary according to the color of the stone, but the per carat levy now starts at less than $1,000. Bargains glitter in gold too. Having hit $850 per ounce in 1980, the mellow yellow now hovers around $350, and new jewelry production techniques have helped hold costs down by taking much of the labor out of making gold chains. Though jewelers are maddeningly cagey about quoting specific prices, an 18- karat necklace selling for $1,290 now, cost $1,500 two years ago. Now is also the time to trade in your old watch for something better. While prices of brand-new timepieces are pretty stable, a strong worldwide collectors' market for vintage watches has dramatically pushed up the value of those that may be only a few years old. Demand for old Rolexes is so robust that some models are worth five times what purchasers paid in the Eighties. Particularly hot is the Rolex Daytona Cosmograph, a mechanical chronograph that keeps track of the passing seconds with great precision, sold five years ago for $1,350. At Tourneau Jewelers in New York City, you can trade in your Daytona for a $6,000 credit on a new watch. Robert Wexler, Tourneau's managing director, notes that since new Rolex diamond watches start at about $4,000, it's possible to trade in a Daytona for a gem-studded replacement and a $2,000 cash refund. Randy Lively, head of Bailey Banks & Biddle, a nationwide chain of 238 jewelry stores, says that overall, retail prices on fine jewelry are down about 15% since last spring. He thinks the trend may continue after the recession has ended: ''Consumers have become much more value conscious. So even in a recovery I don't expect prices to rebound to their Eighties levels.'' Lively's research shows that impulse buying is diminishing: Shoppers now visit five or six different stores before choosing a piece of jewelry. To encourage them to buy from Bailey Banks & Biddle, whose parent, Zale Corp., is in bankruptcy, Lively has hatched a guaranteed trade-in scheme that promises to add 20% a year to the purchase price of a diamond a customer buys now -- if the buyer trades the gem in for a bigger rock within five years. Another Lively twist is a lifetime warranty-cum-service contract on any item with a precious stone in it. If the customer brings the piece in every year for a cleaning and a checkup to make sure the stone is secure in its setting, Bailey Banks & Biddle will replace the stone free if it ever falls out.

-- CARS. Porsche's new 968 sports coupe, at $39,850, costs $3,500 less than the 944 it replaces. That speaks volumes about what's happening in the luxury car market. But price cuts aren't enough: To get high-priced wheels rolling out the door, most dealers are pushing the cheapest leases ever. Take Mercedes-Benz of North America. Today you can lease a 300E sedan (list price: $49,850) for about $600 a month. The entry-level Mercedes 190E 2.3 (sticker price: $28,950) will cost you under $400 a month, or about $100 less than the tiny tank did two years ago. Before you drive either car out of the showroom, you will have to fork over one month's rental and, in some states, a security deposit equal to another month. That's a fraction of the 20% down that buying the car would require. Bill Terhorst, leasing manager at Laurel Motors in Westmont, Illinois, an affluent Chicago suburb, says the sweet deals are bringing customers into his showroom, many of them trading up from one model of Mercedes to another. Used to pine for a Beemer but never got one? Now's your chance. BMW has sliced about $300 a month from the cost of leasing a 735, which saves you $14,000 over a 48-month term. Eric Maas, marketing manager at Classic BMW-Ferrari Sales in Dallas, offers another suggestion on how to trade up into the luxury car market: Buy a slightly used (or ''previously owned,'' if you prefer) BMW or Ferrari instead of a new one. Maas offers this illustration of the savings: A brand-new 1991 BMW 850 sedan would cost $80,000, plus $5,000 in luxury tax and $5,000 in sales tax, for a total of $90,000. But suppose you found the same car in the $ same model year, though with a few hundred miles on the odometer. Depreciation, and the fact that there's no luxury tax on used goods, would bring its price to $74,374 -- or nearly $16,000 less, enough to buy a second, albeit more prosaic, auto. Good idea, but how common are gently used, practically new cars? ''You'd be surprised,'' says Maas. ''Most dealers have five or six of them on hand at any given time. We had a doctor who bought a 735 for cash and brought it back after a few days because his wife couldn't stand the color.''

-- ART AND COLLECTIBLES. The Grand Prize for Trading Up has to go to an anonymous recipient. Browsing at a garage sale in Philadelphia last year, said person bought an old picture frame, with a crumbling photograph in it, for $4. He or she -- our honoree's name has never been revealed -- took the frame home, pulled out the old picture, and found one of the few existing originals of the Declaration of Independence. The price this document fetched at an auction at Sotheby's in New York last June: $2.4 million. Book manuscripts, letters, and other documents with any direct relation to American history have been quietly and steadily going up in price for years, and show no sign of stopping. But anyone who paid top dollar for contemporary paintings and prints in the late Eighties, when speculators flooded into those markets, has a different story to tell. These are selling for relatively modest sums today because the recession has pricked the plungers' balloon. One example, typical of many: In 1987, Roy Lichtenstein's Bull Series, a set of six 1973 lithographs, sold at auction for $60,500. It shot up to a frisky $154,000 at a sale in October 1989. Last November it went for a bearish $37,400. Or take Red Jackie, one of Andy Warhol's rare 1963 portraits of then- First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. Soon after Warhol's death in 1987, the value of his work shot up. In 1989, Red Jackie went for $875,000. Two years later the picture's price had drifted down to $352,000 -- still not peanuts, but no longer Camelot either. Because of that boom-and-bust pattern in prices, Christopher Burge, president and CEO of Christie's, advises anyone who is thinking of buying art or antiques: ''Forget the market and go after what you're passionate about. In the long run, you or your heirs will probably get a very good return. But don't buy just for financial reasons.'' Indeed, until a full-blooded recovery finally comes, no expert is willing to venture any guesses about whether current bargains -- be they sailboats, Seurats, or Sutton Place apartments -- will appreciate enough to qualify over the long term as genuine investments. In the meantime, Burge's advice makes sense in arenas far beyond the auction gallery: Buy only what you can afford and what will truly give you pleasure. That way, if it goes up in value, wonderful. If it doesn't, you won't care.