A few years ago, my wife and I were in a pickle. We had a 2000 Buick with a busted AC, and our credit was clogging the septic tank. After I finally landed a decent job and had been working for a few months, and June arrived in the southern US, we decided to see what we could get.
We ended up trading the Buick in on a 3-year-old Ford Fusion with low miles. We got hit with 20% interest, which I knew was crazy high, but I felt we didn't have much choice. We've been paying those $460 payments for over 4 years now, plus the other high interest car we bought new 2 years ago at 15% with a payment over $500.
We've been tracking our credit with Credit Karma (yes, I know it's not always accurate, but it shows the general track of the score). A few weeks back, we saw that my wife's score had jumped up over 700 (from the low 500s a couple of years back). After doing some preliminary research about cars and rebates etc., we decided to see if we could get a preapproval for a new car loan.
I said, "If we can get a rate that's half of the 20%, it'll be worth it." Logged onto USAA, plugged in the info, and got approved for under 4%. Went that afternoon and got a new car with a payment of $379 with no money down. (Finance manager screwed up on the paperwork and we weren't able to put the money down. Long story, maybe I'll save that for another post.) That's almost $100 less than the old payment, and on a NEW car.
Today, I thought it might be worth checking into a refinance for the other car, and when I did it, I got the rate down to 4.7% instead of the 15% we had before. This also brought that payment down to $330. Now, we'll have a few hundred dollars more to throw at the principals of the loans.
TL;DR - Traded from a 20% loan to less than 4%, and refinanced a 15% loan into a less-than-5% loan, saving us hundreds per month and thousands over the loan life.
Submitted August 10, 2018 at 10:14PM by ducktapedaddy https://ift.tt/2M7z6qM
