Any advice on getting car financing with crappy credit?

Advice on getting car financing with crappy credit: DON'T.

novaderrik wrote: get a granny fresh 10-15 year old car for a couple grand... take the money that you'd make in payments every month and save up until you have enough to put a decent down payment on something newer, which will be easier to finance since you'd be paying for most of it with cash up front.

This^^^^

Someone here had a sweet older Buick they could not sell on.

bentwrench wrote: Don't buy into trying to make someone with unrealistic expectations happy. You will never get satisfaction, because that person will never be happy.

Holy E36 M3! You know my ex-wife!

I hate to say it, but it sounds like someone (if not you, then a finance/credit counselor, pastor, friend who's good with money, etc.) needs to sit down with her and explain you don't get to go bankrupt without paying a penalty, and not being able to buy new cars on credit is one of them.

There's some good advice already about grandma cars that you can buy cheap and reliable. Try to convince her that's an OK option for 2-3 years over putting yourself $20-30k in debt. I hate to hear about GRMers digging a deeper hole :(.

Well a grandma car or 10-15 year old car is out of the cards. Our 12 y.o. vehicle is dead and my 20 year old Jeep is thankfully still driveable.

I'm willing to go with a 4-5 year old car. I'm looking at Carmax because I want something with an extended warranty and they have plenty of cars in the price range that I would need to get the payments I need with the crap APR I'm going to get. It's just going to take getting my wife to realize this is what is going to have to happen.

I have a couple thousand dollars to put down on something and we're making enough right now to take on a car payment. I've done the CL searches and there is nothing in the $2000 range that I would be comfortable letting my wife drive. If this car was for me, I wouldn't care, but it's not.

Thanks for everyone's input, but this thread kind of went the way I thought it would.

JohnRW1621 wrote: Arrange financing first through credit union. They will then say, you can spend $X,xxx on a car not older than xx and your payment will be $xxx per month. You can then buy from private sellers too like cars found in Cl

Dealers can always beat outside financing when it comes to APR.

Sorry OP, I didn't read the rest of the thread..........if your credit is that shot, you're just going to have to deal with it until it comes back up.

If going for Kia, you can get a new optima for under $20k.

SyntheticBlinkerFluid wrote: Well I thank you all for giving advice but unfortunately with my wife in the equation, its making things difficult. She wants a new car or a year old used car. She's the one that's not being realistic, but it's a fight if I try to sway her towards an older car.

not that its my business, but this sounds like a relationship problem, not a shopping problem...

and I'm all for correctly defining the problem, because you tend to get more helpful advice.

In reply to madmallard:

It's not a relationship problem, its because there have been so many things going wrong for us lately and she just wanted something to go right for her for once. I don't blame her for feeling that way, because honestly I have felt pretty down and out lately myself.

I had another talk with her this afternoon and explained things to her as best I could and she seems to get it now, so she has opened up to some older used cars.

The problem is that she sees all the shiny things because the dealers pull up the top of the line crap when you ask to test drive and she doesn't realize that every single one of those things cost extra money. It turns into one of those "where have you been all my life?" moments and her judgement and decision making gets clouded.

Anyways, I found some good vehicles from Carmax and I'm going to stop by Monday to see what they can do for me.

One honest place to.check.is Nissan. They have a hard time.giving versas away, and they're not the worst thing ever. Or a rogue. Get some candy lease, buy it out from under it at the end of terms.or sell it off when you don't have E36 M3hole credit. That's how I got my ms3.

i'd get her a 1984 Citation 4 door and tell her to be happy with it until you guys could actually afford something better... but i'm also kind of a dick sometimes..

wait, no, any Citation that is still running is a collector car now so you will have to over pay for them... maybe something from the early 90's- like a first gen Lumina or Taurus?

i do know of a pretty nice looking 1998 Ford Explorer 2 door with a 4.0 and 5 speed. solid with just a little rust, weeps a little coolant out the head gasket over a period of months... $400 and it's yours, no payments or anything..

SyntheticBlinkerFluid wrote: Thanks for everyone's input, but this thread kind of went the way I thought it would.

Yep. After coming back to this thread yesterday I was a bit angered by some of the comments.

"I scored 2400 on the S.A.T., my FICO is 850, my vehicles are pristine and worth ten times what I paid for them and...oh yeah:

I can bench press a car, I'm an ex football star

with degrees from both Harvard and Yale

Girls just can't keep up, I'm a real love machine

I've had far better sex while in jail

I designed the Sears Tower, I make two grand an hour

I cook the world's best duck flambe

I'll take the pick of the litter, girls jockey for me

I don't need all these lines to get laid..."

Rather than denigrating a guy for his lack of a stepford wife and perfect credit score, why not realize that he lives in the real world and offer some helpful advice or empathy?

If that's beyond your capacity then there are plenty of other threads to look at.

SyntheticBlinkerFluid wrote: In reply to madmallard: It's not a relationship problem, its because there have been so many things going wrong for us lately and she just wanted something to go right for her for once. I don't blame her for feeling that way, because honestly I have felt pretty down and out lately myself.

it shouldn't come at the cost of your integrity. you're not acting in bad faith, so she should be listening to you. You're not punitively denying her something (as near as any of us could tell).

I had another talk with her this afternoon and explained things to her as best I could and she seems to get it now, so she has opened up to some older used cars.

sounds more like the in-the-moment frustration bubbled up, but cooler heads prevail.

The problem is that she sees all the shiny things because the dealers pull up the top of the line crap when you ask to test drive and she doesn't realize that every single one of those things cost extra money. It turns into one of those "where have you been all my life?" moments and her judgement and decision making gets clouded.

is there some of these features that you can add aftermarket to the car for her? A stereo takes care of the bluetooth calling, and they're under 150, plus you get a stereo, just as an example to help improve the shopping experience in getting her along for the ride.

In reply to The_Jed:

What?

I'm not one to buy a new car because of the depreciation ass whoopin' you'll take, but if you must... dealerships can finance new cars easier because many times the manufacturer's financing wing does all that and their #1 priority is to move tin off the lots. Just be prepared to be stuck with this car for a long time. Why?

This is where you need to sit down with the wife and explain to her that if you buy, say, a $17k new car, drop $2k on a down payment, the moment it rolls off the lot it loses about 25% of its value. This means the $17k car is now worth about $13k, you owe $15k so you are starting out $2k in the hole. Just one of many charts out there illustrating this:

The really bad part of this is that the way loans are amortized the majority of what you pay is interest in the first few years, meaning the principal balance on the loan drops slower than depreciation. (Unfortunately, there's no easy to read chart I can find to link. I'd suggest that, before you sign ANYTHING, get an amortization schedule so you can see what I'm talking about.) What this means is you'll be 'upside down' or 'underwater' (both meaning you'll owe more than the car is worth) for most of the term of the loan. The 'low interest' loans do this as well as the higher ones; how else would all these mortgage companies advertising on TV/radio/internet make money? Believe me, even 2.99% APR adds up, mang.

What this means is you better love that car and plan to keep it a LONG time, like years after the loan is paid off, to be able to justify a loan on such an expensive purchase. FWIW, I had this same discussion with my (now ex) m-i-l when she bought her KIA Spectra 5 several years ago. We looked at depreciation charts, amortization schedules etc and she saw my financial point. Her emotional point? She had never owned a brand new car and was determined to. The scary part (to me) was that her loan would extend past the date she planned to retire, and she also had a house mortgage (not a big one, nearly paid off etc) which also extended past her target retirement date. So she did the deal, started getting hit with bigger than before property tax bills, her insurance went up, etc etc etc and to cut to the chase she wound up taking out a reverse mortgage on her nearly paid for house in order to cover those bills.

IMHO it's certainly doable (it's done every day all over the country) but know what you are getting into. Also consider the effects of this decision on other parts of your life: do you want to buy a house? Add more to your retirement funds? Etc. None of these stand alone; see above.

So to sum up my recommendation: it's doable, it's easier with a new car but you need to be aware of the pitfalls. Again, this is just me: I'd do the credit union thing, take the $2k you already have and buy a used car no more than $6k (it's near the end of its depreciation cycle) and work on saving money up for other things.

Oh, and one other thing: whatever you do, do NOT consider a credit card! That way lies true financial danger.

In reply to Curmudgeon:

Thanks for the advice. New cars are off the table now after my talk with her.

I have been used car shopping since the beginning, so I know what's out there.

SyntheticBlinkerFluid wrote: In reply to madmallard: It's not a relationship problem, its because there have been so many things going wrong for us lately and she just wanted something to go right for her for once. I don't blame her for feeling that way, because honestly I have felt pretty down and out lately myself.

OK, "Something to go right for her for once." Like, a car payment? That's going "right?" What happened the last time ya'll had a collection of "payments?" Did that "go right" even though you got a bunch of nice new stuff? No? Well, maybe stay out of debt from here on out and that is "going right." A $2K car with no payments while you sock away that $400 a month that the payment would have been and you can have a fairly nice car in a year or two. Two years at $400/mo is ten large. My LS400 was 7.5 large and that is a Really Nice Car. Can she drive a beater Camry or Corolla for 2 years? My friend just sold a really nice Y2K Rolla 5 speed for a grand. It sold on CL in about 3 hours. I posted it on here and no one wanted it. Another friend bought a '97 Rolla for a grand with about 100K miles and needing trim pieces and door handles because the seller's boyfriend went all hulk hogan on the car. Point being that they are out there and two large will get you a decent driver (or 10 second race car, right Andy?) if you look around and are patient.

Or, ignore my advice. Buy the best car on easy payments that Carmax will sell you. See what happens and remember the last time you had payments.

In reply to Dr. Hess:

See now you're just attacking me and making assumptions on how we went into debt in the first place, which I will let you know was because of medical debt. I've always saved up money to buy things. I've never had a credit card and my wife had a couple when we started dating, but were paid off after we were married, so don't scold me like I'm a child and act like you know me personally when you don't know the whole story.

I don't have to explain my current situation more than I already have. We've had a lot of bad stuff happen to us lately, especially with our primary vehicle taking a E36 M3 on us, so yeah, a positive thing would be nice right now.

Several people here have already answered my question. Who knows, it may come down to a CL car.

Do your best to avoid buying a new car, it's going to cost you big time in the long run compared to a decent used one, and this is coming from someone in no better of a situation than you.

Sorry SBF. However, my advice still stands: Don't. In the long run, that will work out best for anyone. And going into debt is not a "positive."

Medical debt is a whole sub-game. They can't repo it. It is so "gamed" that the states (except maybe NJ) even put it in a separate category so that it basically expires (statute of limitations runs out) sooner than other debts. Everyone knows the medical system is butt-berkeleying the American people. Declaring a bankruptcy for medical debt is probably not the best long term answer to anyone's problem, but too late for that, it's done.

So, to be positive: Used Camry. Used Corolla. Save your money and buy something really nice when you can just hand over cash/check. Beat The Man at his own game.

I was in this exact situation myself years ago. In my early 20's I racked up very high and unfortunate medical expenses, in addition to debt that a 20-something had no business doing. I went down the bankruptcy path, and it still sucks this many years later. But, making the right decisions after has helped a bit. I can tell your wife this - you don't need a car payment. I was the same way and was convinced I couldn't find a car that wouldn't break down, when really it was was that I was embarrassed to drive a beater. Not saying that is how she feels, but it was additional embarrassment on top of that which I already had for my credit problems. After I came to terms that it was going to take a few years of hard work, this is what I did - I opened a VERY low limit credit card and made religiously dedicated payments to it. I had 2 recurring bills and an automatic payment to make sure it was always cycling. THIS is what will help build her credit, not a car payment. Then, I scoured Craigslist and thought "what used car can I buy cheap, that has bottomed in depreciation and I can turn around and sell for what I paid" Answer: Jeep Wrangler. I found a high mileage example on Craigslist, paid $3,500 cash, rode the bejesus out of it for 2 years, and then turned around and sold it for $4,000. It wasn't until years later that banks were willing to work with me on a car loan and at that point they still wanted INSANE APR's for a used car, we're talking like 10%, and on a new car, most banks want more than $2k down. I don't care what people say about "so and so walked in with bad credit and no down payment and got a new car", to that I say, I doubt it, and also, good luck with a $650+ payment over 8 years on the type of cars they offer folks with bad credit (Mitsubishi and stripped out dumpy Chrysler cars immediately come to mind). Anyone that extends themselves like that over a depreciating material asset hasn't really learned a financial lesson. Again, I am definitely not judging, as I have been in her shoes and it sucks, I am merely offering the exact same insight and advice that I offer to my close friends and family.

What are your requirements for a vehicle?

Oh and don't forget the other considerations she will have that I have experienced. Because of her bankruptcy the insurance on a new car will be startling. Trust me, I know. She may want to get some quotes first and see if that payment may be the same as a monthly insurance payment. I was shocked. Again, it's taken me years of struggle and embarrassment and cringing when an employer, apartment lease, or anyone else ran my credit. And all those things are way more important than a new car. Also there are so many fun used rides on Craigslist (as I sit here browsing for my $4k commuter ride when I move to Seattle)

Dr. Hess wrote: Medical debt is a whole sub-game... ...Declaring a bankruptcy for medical debt is probably not the best long term answer to anyone's problem...

So, teach me something. What is a better approach?

This is starting to look like a festival of butt sore.

The best advice anyone can give for getting car financing with crappy credit is don't do it. That's kind of obvious. Why do people get uptight when folks say it?

If we don't actually want good advice, maybe we shouldn't ask for it. How about a thread titled, "I know I shouldn't do this. Please don't say so. Just make me feel good anyway".

SBF: I understand you are frustrated with the situation. But you know better than to get too upset with Dr. Hess's bedside manner. Most of the time he speaks the truth, but he is most certainly not the guy you want to ask to make you feel warm and fuzzy. If you make the effort to assume he means well and not take it personally, or hear it in the "insulting-and-demeaning-tone-in-your-head", there can be some very good stuff to glean from him.