Financing Your Vehicle

I Need To Buy A Car Right Now

Many used car buyers fall into this category. You need a car right now because your vehicle is dead or dying. They’ve been to the shop and it’s going to cost more to fix than it will to get another car.

If you are in this group you’re going to make your purchase within days, which means you can’t fix your credit, you don’t have a down payment and you haven’t gotten financing from a bank or credit union. If this is you, this is what you need to do:

Buy the cheapest vehicle you can that’s reliable – explain to the dealer(s) you are working with that you need something cheap and reliable and that if the dealer works with you you’ll trade up when you improve your credit and save for a bigger down payment.

Make a budget -Because what you want and what you can pay for are often different, the first thing to do when you go to buy is to start by making a realistic budget with all of your monthly expenses, and we mean everything. This will give you a pretty solid idea of what you can afford before we get into credit, interest rates, and loan length. To make budgeting easier we’ve provided a link to a simple budget that you can download. [NEED TO INSERT DOWNLOADABLE LINK]

Using it is simple, all you do is fill in all of the blanks that apply to your life and it will automatically calculate your annual budget and then tell you how big a payment you can make every month without getting into trouble. Don’t fill out the transportation section we’ve entered in the average cost of gas and maintenance, the spreadsheet will do the rest.

If some of the sections don’t apply, don’t worry, just leave them blank. When you’re done you’ll have a budget minus the car payment. The spreadsheet will automatically calculate your potential monthly car payment in the last line (line 100). Keep in mind that this doesn’t include any down payment and as we will explain you need to plan for that. While we strongly suggest you use the spreadsheet or get someone to help you, if you don’t want to or can’t, just copy the budget items to a piece of lined paper and calculate the monthly costs in the same way.

Manage your credit – Once you’ve figured out how much you can afford to pay each month, the next step in the process is to find out about your credit. It's easy to access your score. The largest credit bureaus like Equifax and Experian offer free credit scores. Here’s a link to Experian’s free product, (https://www.experian.com/consumer-products/free-credit-report.html ) and it’s easy to find on the other sites

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