Cross posted from Discuit
12% is pretty insane for an asset that depreciates as fast as a vehicle does.
My first car had a 23% interest rate on the loan. I had no credit history and was relying on people I thought knew enough about car buying with me to help me know if I was getting shafted. That dealership has remained on my do not buy list ever since, even after changing ownership due to the previous owners practices of fraud
It’s such a sham that the “truth in lending” laws still didn’t go far enough to simplify the Financials of loan interest.
Honestly the biggest problem was not that I wasn’t shown the interest rate, but that they carefully avoided any financial talk (I never actually saw the final price of the vehicle, only the monthly payment and only learned the exact details, including the several extra thousand dollars of extended service plans when I was going to refinance the loan at my bank) and carefully flipped through the paperwork to encourage jumping straight to signing without reading, even joking “oh no you don’t want to read that” at one stage
Every car I’ve bought since I’ve been extremely diligent to read through all of the paperwork before signing anything, and one of the times caught the permission to sell data for marketing purposes form which I declined (the salesperson seemed surprised when I spotted that one and said “oh that looks like one to decline”)
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