QuestionWell, I am about to anyway.
I was talked into a lease car by, who I realize now was a very aggressive car dealer. I was 23 at the time with good enough credit to lease a 07 Cobalt with no co-signer. I've paid about 18,o00 into it now for this lease. I assume leased vehicles make them more money than purchased ones, as he talked me out of just buying it. I had good credit but not much, and had no concept how it works.
My life changed greatly after a year into my lease and I ended up moving across country. I had the car re-posessed for a week last Christmas, and generally am 15 days past payments consistantly. I've ruined my credit with this car.
My lease is up in a month.
I'm trying desperatley to find my options.
I've put 100,000 miles on this car (60,000 over the agreement) and i've got a dent in the front fender (they don't call it the wild west for nothing). I know I'll end up paying at least 15,000 to return the car in penalties. Or I can buy it out for 9,000.
The way I see it my only option is to buy the car, or go doubly into debt. I do know as a last resort I can return the car, owe what I owe, and get a car from Drive Time.
I do not know my credit score. It is below 600 when I checked a year ago. I don't really have much other debt, a hospital bill and some late payments on a bank loan. My total debt is no more than 2000, But I don't believe I had much credit when I started. I have a good paying job and can well afford the loans.
I've found some bad-credit loan places. But they all require the vehicle to be under 90,000 and want to loan you over 15,000. Plus I'm sure that stint in reposession is a huge glare on my record.
I really don't know my options. I could use any kind of reccomendation. Websites that might loan me the 9k for my lease with that high of miles. I'm hoping there is terminology that I just haven't figured out. Everyone keeps referring to my car as used, but I've been the only driver? And talk of re-financing a used vehicle? Isn't there specific termonology and guidlines for buying leased cars?
I will rate high, i'm just very sick about all of this and need to know where to go
Answer
carguy
Hi Elise...
Some of the people that irresponsible dealers stuff into a lease when they shouldn't be anywhere near one astounds me. If I assume your car is a Cobalt LT Cpe fairly loaded I shouldn't hopefully be too far off. Here is where you are at. The good news is you could be much worse Is your current lease with GMAC? (ironically called a Smart Lease). Who the lease was through could be important ...If it's through the captive lender (GMAC) then you won't have as much leverage as you would through a bank bank like Key Bank. The difference is that Key Bank isn't really in the car business ...they just finance cars and they will often times lower the lease end value and purchase price because they don't have a remarketing department and are very happy just being the bank...in other words they don't want your car back in the worst way. GMAC on the other hand is in the car business and is set up to deal with your car should they end up with it at lease end. I have seen some of the non captive lenders drop the lease end buy outprice by as much as 5k+.
Secondly, how bad is the front end beat up? 1,000? 2,000? 5,000?
Thirdly, no matter what you do it's imperative that you get your credit reports for free online at www.annualcreditreport.com (it's really free and you can get all 3) with no scores ...but the purpose is to not see your score so much as it is to make sure you do't have something ridiculous ...like being currently past due on a $20.00 payment on your cap one visa or something. A CURRENT PAST DUE ON YOUR BUREAU CAN TORPEDO YOUR SCORE BY 100+ POINTS...if you know about it now then you can make sure it's brought current before you go in to do anything. I need to finish this a little bit later ... my personal email address is roadloans@gmail.com if you shoot me your email then i will send you back my direct phone number ...to do this correctly we really need to have a quick chat... otherwise I will end up writing a book and you may not understand what I mean....there are many thing you can do to take some or all of the sting out of something like this... I will look for youer email.
