My girlfriend's car finally bit the dust mechanically, and it would be about $1200 to get it fixed when it Bluebooks for about $300. Obviously time for a new car, and it wasn't a total surprise, just a little sooner than anticipated. Anyway.
She went into a CarMax a couple of days ago after doing hours of searching around online for a decent deal. Its a 2018 Mitsubishi Mirage with I think 36k miles for like $9,999 or something in that ballpark. She knows her credit score/history isn't great, somewhere in the 650s, so she asked her father (who lives halfway across the country, as do I, so I haven't been with her in person for any of this) to co-sign for her, as CarMax told her over the phone that he can co-sign and make a down payment by just being on the phone to verbally agree and go into his local CarMax and sign papers and make the down payment. Her father has objectively great credit and makes good money.
So after we had a solid plan, she went into CarMax to buy the car, and she said that the sales lady continually insisted that getting a co-signer for the car would be way more trouble than it's worth. Saying things like "Are you sure you want to get a co-signer? You won't really save that much on APR and then you have to worry about them not wanting to give up half-ownership of the car later." and "I've seen it work out very badly for most people when they get a co-signer, I wouldn't recommend it." Repeat ad nauseum.
So my gf, not being a very confrontational person, said okay after the sales lady assured her that even if they did the sale today without a co-signer, she has a 3 day (maybe longer?) grace period to return the car if she isn't happy and get a full refund, etc. So to make a long story short she got a roughly $12k loan with an almost 13% interest rate. I told her seems really not good, and she agreed, she didn't feel very good about the whole transaction.
So my question out of all of this is mainly: Is this sales lady full of crap? I've never heard of a dealership advising against a co-signer. It usually goes the other way, where they tell you that they essentially can't get you a loan without a co-signer if you have bad credit. I can't tell if I just simply don't understand something about this situation or if something sketchy is going on. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, as neither of us really have too much experiencing buying cars from dealerships. Thanks in advance friends. Feel free to ask any clarification questions, its a lot to type out and I'm sure I've missed something.
TL;DR: Dealership is strongly advising against a co-signer for someone with relatively poor credit. Something feels very not right about it.
EDIT: For clarification, its actually a 2017 with 47k miles. Also, the 12k price included an extended 5 year warranty and gap insurance. Just wanted to clear that up after she corrected me.
Submitted May 02, 2019 at 06:07PM by MamawRex http://bit.ly/2ZSSyuT
