Falling in between the holiday shopping season and the summer travel months, spring is a time when you may find yourself with a little extra cash in your budget. This is especially true if you are just getting a tax refund back. If you’re looking to make the most out of that surplus dough, consider items that tend to be offered at bargain prices during this time of year. Here are a few categories of goods that usually offer the greatest savings in spring relative to other times of the year.

Refrigerator
Normally, manufacturers bust out the new fridge models in summer. That means in the spring they are looking to clear inventory space by slashing prices on the older models. If you can do without the latest and greatest bells and whistles, you can land a great bargain.

Thrift store/flea market items
Each of these low-price shopping venues has even better deals in the spring. The reason: overstocked inventory needs to be moved. Thrift stores get their highest number of donations as the weather turns warmer and people start to do spring cleaning and clearing out. It also doesn’t hurt that many people do their taxes in spring and want the charitable deductions that come with donations.

Flea market vendors spend all winter loading up on items to sell outdoors when the mercury rises. That means they enter the spring pretty deep in the hole with their expenses and with lots of goods that are costly to transport. These types of vendors are more likely to accept low offers in the spring as they hurry to get into the black with their bottom line.

Vacuum cleaner
June is new vacuum model month, as any housecleaning implement aficionado will tell you. Like last year’s refrigerator models, the older vacuums need to be sold off to make room for the parade of the new super suckers.

Carpet
Sometimes the easiest way to think of the best time to buy an item is to rule out all the worst times to buy it. For carpets, that would be summer, fall and winter. Summer because that is when many people are doing home improvement projects. Fall and winter because those are times when people are both preparing to have guests over for the holidays and are looking to “warm up” their domiciles with a floor covering. That leaves us spring as the time to find great sales.

Lawnmowers
It seems counterintuitive that great deals can be had on a machine for cutting grass right when the grass is really starting to grow. But there are other factors at work here. Chief among these is that lawnmowers tend to be extremely large and thus are very expensive for businesses to keep around. If you can find a store with a lot of big mowers on hand, you’ve got a motivated seller.

HVAC services
Most people wait until early summer to get their air conditioning serviced or early winter to get their furnace checked. That makes spring a slow time in the HVAC world. If you shop around you will find that a lot of these operations offer deep discounts this time of year to encourage preventative care check-ups.

Sports shoes
Early spring is the big rush time for new shoes as people emerge from their winter dens to get outside and start pounding the pavement. If you can wait until May to get those new jogging shoes you could find the post-rush sweet spot when retailers start marking down the models that didn’t sell out in the big early spring push.