Car financed at 24.90% — what can I do?
If you are a subprime borrower, that may not be an unreasonable rate given the risk they are accepting. In any case, it's what you agreed to. As others have said, you could/should have shopped elsewhere for the loan. In fact, you can still shop elsewhere for a loan to refinance that vehicle and thus lower the rate, unless the existing loan has equally obnoxious rules about that. Anytime you borrow money at that rate, you are getting ripped off.   One way to rectify this situation is to pay the car off as soon as possible.  You can probably get a second job that makes $1000 per month.  If so you will be done in 4 months.    Do that and you will pay less than $300 in interest.  It is a small price to pay for an important lesson. While you can save some money refinancing, working and paying the loan off is, in my opinion a better option.  Even if you can get the rate down to 12%, you are still giving too much money to banks. You could look into refinancing with a bank or credit union.  But to weed out options quickly, use a service like LendingTree, which can vet multiple options for you a whole lot more quickly than you could probably do yourself.  (I don't work for, or get any benefit from LendingTree.)  Whatever you do, try to do all the applying within a short span of time, as to not negatively affect your credit score (read here) by creating extraneous inquiries.   Then again, if your credit sucks, you might not qualify for a re-fi.  If you are turned down, make your payments on time for six months or so, and try again.
yeah but the autonomous cars do things like take them wheels to the gas station and get that automated fill up and pay with a finance algorithm and they clearly take themselves to the car wash maybe these cars need to be different so that interior and exterior can survive a power wash ... I think you are making this more complicated that it has to be.  In the end you will end up with a car that you paid X, and is worth Y. Your numbers are a bit hard to follow.  Hopefully I got this right. I am no accountant, this is how I would figure the deal: The payments made are irrelevant.  The downpayment is irrelevant as it is still a reduction in net worth.   Your current car has a asset value of <29,500>.  That should make anyone pause a bit.   In order to get into this new car you will have to finance the shortfall on the current car (29,500), the price of the vehicle (45,300), the immediate depreciation (say 7,000).  In the end you will have a car worth 38K and owe 82K.  So you will have a asset value of <44,000>.  Obviously a much worse situation.  To do this car deal it would cost the person 14,500 of net worth the day the deal was done.  As time marched on, it would be more as the reduction in debt is unlikely to keep up with the depreciation. Additionally the new car purchase screen shows a payment of $609/month if you bought the car with zero down.  Except you don't have zero down, you have -29,500 down.  Making the car payment higher, I estamate 1005/month with 3.5%@84 months.  So rather than having a hit to your cash flow of $567 for 69 more months, you would have a payment of about $1000 for 84 months if you could obtain the interest rate of 3.5%. Those are the two things I would focus on is the reduction in net worth and the cash flow liability.   I understand you are trying to get a feel for things, but there are two things that make this very unrealistic.  The first is financing.  It is unlikely that financing could be obtained with this deal and if it could this would be considered a sub-prime loan.  However, perhaps a relative could finance the deal. Secondly, there is no way even a moderately financially responsible spouse would approve this deal.  That is provided there were not sigificant assets, like a few million. If that is the case why not just write a check? Most of stock trading occurs on what is called a secondary market. For example, Microsoft is traded on NASDAQ, which is a stock exchange. An analogy that can be made is that of selling a used car. When you sell a used car to a third person, the maker of your car is unaffected by this transaction and the same goes for stock trading. Still within the same analogy, when the car is first sold, money goes directly to the maker (actually more complicated than that but good enough for our purposes). In the case of stock trading, this is called an Initial Public Offering (IPO) / Seasoned Public Offering (SPO), for most purposes. What this means is that a drop of value on a secondary market does not directly affect earning potential. Let me add some nuance to this. Say this drop from 20$ to 10$ is permanent and this company needs to finance itself through equity (stock) in the future. It is likely that it would not be able to obtain as much financing in this matter and would either 1) have to rely more on debt and raise its cost of capital or 2) obtain less financing overall. This could potentially affect earnings through less cash available from financing. One last note: in any case, financing does not affect earnings except through cost of capital (i.e. interest paid) because it is neither revenue nor expense. Financing obtained from debt increases assets (cash) and liabilities (debt) and financing obtained from stock issuance increases assets (cash) and shareholder equity. Which way would save the most money? Paying of the car today would save the most money.  Would you borrow money at 20% to put it in a savings account?  That's effectively what she is doing by not paying off the car. If it were me, I would pay off the car today, and add the car payment to my savings account each month.  If the car payment is $400, that's $1,500 a month that can be saved, and the $12k will be back in 8 months. That said - remember that this is your GIRLFRIEND, not a spouse.  You are not in control (or responsible for) her finances. I would not tell her that she SHOULD do this - only explain it to her in different ways, and offer advice as to what YOU would do.  Look together at how much has been paid in principal and interest so far, how much she's paying in interest each month now, and how much she'll pay for the car over the life of the loan.  (I would also encourage her not to buy cars with a 72-month loan, which I'm guessing is how she got here). In the end, though, it's her decision. Is it possible to get a 0% interest rate for car loan for used car in   US? Possible? Yes. It's not illegal. Likely? Not really. $5K is not a very high amount, many banks won't even finance it at all, regardless of your credit score. I suggest you try local credit unions, especially those that your employer is sponsoring (if there are any). Otherwise, you will probably get horrible rates, but for 3 months - you can just take whatever, pay the 3 months interest and get rid of the loan as soon as you're able. You have to have 9% ROI for your investment to break even. That's pretty steep. I'd pay the loan, where you have 9% promised return. Just make sure that there are no pre-payment penalties, and that you're comfortable enough with not having that money available. A loan that does not begin with **at least a 20% deposit** and run through a term of **no longer than 48 months** is the world's way of telling you that *you can't afford this vehicle*.  Consumer-driven cars are rapidly depreciating assets. Attenuating the loan to 70 months or longer means that payments will not keep up with normal depreciation, thus trapping the buyer in an upside down loan for the entire term. I'm not saying it's great, but I have a 705... I think we'll get a second opinion to lower that rate. Also, logically, with a higher down payment, we should be able to reduce the amount we need to borrow. Is that how that would work? For example, if we scrounged up a $7,000 for a down payment and came down on the price say $3,000