Just went through a mess trying to finance a used car. I haven’t borrowed money since 2012, no debt, no credit cards, just living within my means. When I applied for a loan, I was told I was refused. Not because of bad credit, but because I hadn’t used credit recently enough.
The dealership advertises “no applications refused,” but apparently if you don’t have an active debt history, you’re too much of a mystery for the system.
Co-signer? Not allowed. Using my own bank account for payments? Denied. Their solution? Open a joint account with my dad just to satisfy a bank’s paperwork, pay hundreds in fees over 6 years just to make it work.
The credit system says you can’t borrow money unless you’ve already been borrowing money, like somehow living within your means disqualifies you. It’s not about good credit, it’s about loyalty to the debt game. Screw you for standing on your own feet, I guess.
Just needed to get that off my chest. Anyone else run into this nonsense?
I was always told that if you go to buy a car and offer cash that it is like a magic bullet that ends puts all the cards in your hands, I learned that they can refuse a cash offer and only finance cars because they make all their money on the financing.
The “trick” is to only mention you’re paying cash at the end. I went through this after hitting a deer and totalling my car last year after I received my settlement. They’ll usually offer something small like a few hundred dollars off or whatever when you casually mention your price when test driving. He basically tried to walk it back at the end when we sat down to discuss financing when he found out I was paying cash, which was incredibly shitty, but he had to “go in his boss’s office” or whatever to commit to what he said previously
It’s all such a stupid song and dance that’s pretty much on par with birds mating.
That is what I did and they were like sorry, we only finance and let me walk out.
Haha so that means effectively you can’t get a car for the advertised price?
As a (brief) former car salesperson, this is 100% true. Cash offers are actually less profitable, well, assuming the buyer is also negotiating down to the wire on margins.
I’m someone who may want to buy a car cash how should I do it? Just wait until everything is set up then just pay? I don’t want them to deny me
This isn’t an every case, but maybe just don’t even bring it up until the end. Claim you want to get all the numbers settled, even if they’re discussing payments and stuff, just keep an eye on the actual price of the vehicle (+ taxes, title, doc fees).
Then at the end you could just say, great, and say you’ll be paying in cash. They might be miffed, that’s their problem.
Some places still make you fill out a credit app for liability purposes, but I’m not entirely sure that’s even necessary in actuality.
Now, that said, sometimes dealerships get kickbacks based on financing deals they acquire - so it may bake into the price they’re offering. If that’s the case we often just told people straight up and then gave them instructions on how to make principal-only payments. So you could feasibly do this to snag a great deal and then just pay it off immediately.
Another benefit for the latter is if it’s 0% or close to, you could do it over 6-12 months that way if something insane happens you’d still have that cash just in case and your total interest outlay with the accelerated payments would be pretty negligible.
I pay cash for my used cars, but I only buy from individuals, never dealers. People selling cars seldom invest in covering up problems, and they are more than happy to receive cash. There can also be a bit of a difference between the official paperwork price and the amount that actually changes hands.