WTB: Grown-up Car

[SlimKlim]

Having bought a handful of cars..dont get suckered into the "low interest rate, bad price" vortex of doom. You can end up saying "oh, look, this car is 400$ a month" because the interest rate is 1%, but the problem is if you sell the car before it's paid off, you're not selling the interest rate, you're selling based on how much you still owe on it. Starting off with a lower bottom line is better than having a good interest rate on just about any deal.

To add to this, if you do plan to buy new or nearly new, either put enough cash down to get yourself in front of the brunt of depreciation, or make sure you're really in love with the car so you own it long enough to get the amount owed caught back up to the value of the car. If you put $2k down and pay $400/mo on a $30k car and decide you don't want it in a year you'll lose your shirt twice trying to get rid of it. Whereas if you did like $6k down you'd be in much better shape.

As far as where to get the loan, poke around. If you buy new and have good credit or a cosigner, you might get 0% from the manufacturer's finance company. Otherwise I'd go through a credit union. I'm a member of Apple Federal and I think they are offering "as low as" 2.20% on used car loans. I'm also a member of PenFed (just on paper) and they are offering 1.74% on used cars, 0.74% if you buy through their "TrueCar" buying service, and I think 0.74% on new car loans in general. NavyFed also has pretty awesome rates, but can be tricker to join than PenFed. All you have to do to get into PenFed (if you arent a military family) is donate to a military charity.

I'm going to apply for a PenFed one today actually, as soon as their Online Banking Portal stops timing out between page loads... if that one doesn't work out I'm just going to take whatever Apple offers me.