Like reading others' success stories so I thought I'd post one of my own. Back when we were just beginning to get our credit cleaned up we purchased a car. Not a move we would have made except a drunk driver decided we didn't need the car which we had. (which only had liability due to its age and value) We had to buy a car and wanted something that would last. The car that was totalled was a nissan sentra with more than 150,XXX miles on it so we wanted to stick with nissan. Bought an 2003 Altima but got raped on the finance charge (>21% through Wells Fargo) We had to have a car and couldn't get done anywhere else so we took it. With the help of this board our scores are up and we got a pre-approval for refinancing through Household. Said they could lower our current rate by 3%. So we applied got an approval and called them to finish it up. They asked what our current int. rate was and not wanting to highball them I told them I wasn't sure. She said, "well we've got you at 10%". I almost fell out. This isn't supoer prime by any means, but in the course of about 6 months, we are going from 21% (at least 21, dont remember what it really was) to 10%. This saved us $140.XX per month in payment. Thanks for all the help guys! For all the curious ones, Household pulled Equifax and our scores were both between 615-630. We had tried Eloan for a refinance and they declined us so we are very happy with the 10%. Next time we buy a car, I know we'll be looking at the 0%! THANKS FOR THE INFO AND HELP!
I figured If I said something like 21% they would have come back with 17% or something like that. 10% was beyond our wildest dreams. We know our getting better, but it's easier to buy a car outright than it is to get it refinanced.
