Car Loan Hindsight

Choose wisely, prepare for an Everest of paperwork, and lots and lots of waiting. I’ve recently gone down the path of falling in love with a car, which ended up taking me to a car loan stopover, 4 year stopover. I looked around for a car loan for about 2 days.

It is quite surprising how each lender can differ so much. Some don’t allow co-signers, some include the full amount of rent even if you share payments, some require deposits, others won’t touch cars over 3 years old. Once you’ve sifted out all the ones that aren’t compatible you are now tasked with an overwhelming feat of applying to as many as you may like. I visited a couple of banks, applied, didn’t hear back fast enough and cut them off. I ended up going with my own bank, of which I somewhat regret.

I went into a branch to get things rolling, they were awesome, thorough, and were taking down my points of interest too, exactly what I was after. I was contacted 2 hours later by a consultant in Sydney (they contract their car financing out to another company… of course). I missed the call, so I impatiently called back, then got an Indian guy, of which was barely understandable. He helped me out, gave me some tactics on how to lower the rate down. It worked. From 16.8% down to 12%, nice-ish. But correspondence went downhill from there.

There is nothing worse that going into 4 years of debt and not being able to get in contact with the devil. These guys wouldn’t answer their phones. They wouldn’t reply to their emails until 3 hours or later. I called one morning to see what was happening with the application, they said he was on coffee back and would let him know to call me back. He didn’t for four hours; I called them back, “oh, sorry, he’s not in today” Well thanks for telling me. So I asked to get my consultant transferred to someone else, didn’t work out too well, in fact I ended up with 2 different consultants.

In the end I got it all done, with 3 different contacts, 6 contracts, and lots and lots of stress and sleepless nights. If you ever want to know what a car loan deposit is, it’s simply to reduce the banks risk. You take a loan out for 100k, you give 20k as a deposit, don’t worry, you won’t be ripped off that 20k, of which the wording/phone calls I dealt with was quite different. My advice is:

If you want a new car; before you start looking, look for all the finance options available, no less than 2 days should you spend on research, if the offers appear viable, only then should you start looking at cars. Phone the financier, make sure you can understand them, can work with them, and trust what they are saying. You will be loaded with an easy path to finance of which will give you extra bargaining power against the dealer. But thats just my experience….