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.
"Pay it off. If necessary, get a loan so you can pay it off; that's what refinancing is all about and your favorite bank or credit union would be happy to help you with this. If that isn't sufficient to make the car affordable you may need to sell it, take the loss, and learn from the experience. Sorry, but you made an agreement and it's up to you to find a way to meet your end of the bargain. (If you had decided you didn't like this loan within a few days of signing, you might have been able to back out under ""cooling off period"" laws. But those only allow a very limited time for reconsideration.)" Cash price is $22,500. Financed, it's the same thing (0% interest) but you pay a $1500 fee. 1500/22500 = 6.6%. Basically the APR for your loan is 1.1% per year but you are paying it all upfront. Opportunity cost: If you take the $22,500 you plan to pay for the car and invested it, could you earn more than the $1500 interest on the car loan? According to google, as of today you can get 1 year CD @ 1.25% so yes. It's likely that interest rates will be going up in medium term so you can potentially earn even more.  Insurance cost: If you finance you'll have to get comprehensive insurance which could be costly. However, if you are planning to get it anyway (it's a brand new car after all), that's a wash. Which brings me to my main point: Why do you have $90k in a savings account? Even if you are planning to buy a house you should have that money invested in liquid assets earning you interest.  Conclusion: Take the cheap money while it's available. You never know when interest rates will go up again. That interest rate (13%) is steep, and the balloon payment will have him paying more interest longer. Investing the difference is a risky proposition because past performance of an investment is no guarantee of future performance. Is taking that risk worth netting 2%? Not for me, but you must answer that last question for yourself. To your edit: How disruptive would losing the car and/or getting negative marks on your credit be? If you can quantify that in dollars then you have your answer. "One part of the equation that I don't think you are considering is the loss in value of the car.  What will this 30K car be worth in 84 months or even 60 months?  This is dependent upon condition, but probably in the neighborhood of $8 to $10K.   If one is comfortable with that level of financial loss, I doubt they are concerned with the investment value of 27K over the loan of 30K @.9%. I also think it sets a bad precedent.  Many, and I used to be among them, consider a car payment a necessary evil.  Once you have one, it is a difficult habit to break.  Psychologically you feel richer when you drive a paid for car.  Will that advantage of positive thinking lead to higher earnings?  Its possible. The old testament book of proverbs gives many sound words of advice.  And you probably know this but it says:  ""...the borrower is slave to the lender"".  In my own experience, I feel there is a transformation that is beyond physical to being debt free." The .9% looks great, but it's not as relevant as the cost of the car itself. There are those who believe that one should never own a new car, that the first X years/miles of a car's life are the most expensive.  The real question is how your budget is allocated. Is the car payment a small sliver or a large slice? How big is the housing wedge? The best thing to do is pay off the car. Adding more variables to a negotiation with a car dealer (in this case, a trade in), is always going to go in their favor. This is why people recommend negotiating a price down first, before ever mentioning to the dealer you want to do a trade in or financing. "For the future: NEVER buy a car based on the payment.  When dealers start negotiating, they always try to have you focus on the monthly payment.  This allows them to change the numbers for your trade, the price they are selling the car for, etc so that they maximize the amount of money they can get.  To combat this you need to educate yourself on how much total money you are willing to spend for the vehicle, then, if you need financing, figure out what that actually works out to on a monthly basis. NEVER take out a 6 year loan.  Especially on a used car.  If you can't afford a used car with at most a 3 year note (paying cash is much better) then you can't really afford that car.  The longer the note term, the more money you are throwing away in interest.  You could have simply bought a much cheaper car, drove it for a couple years, then paid CASH for a new(er) one with the money you saved.   Now, as to the amount you are ""upside down"" and that you are looking at new cars.  $1400 isn't really that bad.  (note: Yes you were taken to the cleaners.)  Someone mentioned that banks will sometimes loan up to 20% above MSRP.  This is true depending on your credit, but it's a very bad idea because you are purposely putting yourself in the exact same position (worse actually).   However, you shouldn't need to worry about that.  It is trivial to negotiate such that you pay less than sticker for a new car while trading yours in, even with that deficit.  Markup on vehicles is pretty insane.  When I sold, it was usually around 20% for foreign and up to 30% for domestic: that leaves a lot of wiggle room. When buying a used car, most dealers ask for at least $3k more than what they bought them for... Sometimes much more than that depending on blue book (loan) value or what they managed to talk the previous owner out of.   Either way, a purchase can swallow that $1400 without making it worse.  Buy accordingly." I've read online that 20% is a reasonable amount to pay for a car each month - Don't believe everything you read on the internet.  But, let me ask, does your current car have zero expense? No fuel, no oil change, no repairs, no insurance? If the 20% is true, you are already spending a good chunk of it each month. My car just celebrated her 8th birthday. And at 125,000 miles, needed $3000 worth of maintenance repairs.  The issue isn't with buying the expensive car, you can buy whatever you can afford, that's a personal preference. It's how you propose to budget for it that seems to be bad math. Other members here have already pointed out that this financial decision might not be so wise. Before we were married my wife financed a car at a terrible rate. I think it was around 20%. When trying to refinance it the remaining loan was much larger than the value of the car, so no one was interested in refinancing. I was able to do a balance transfer to a credit card around 10%. This did take on a bit of risk, which almost came up when the car was totaled in an accident. Fortunately the remaining balance was now less than the value of the car, otherwise I would have been stuck with a credit card payment and no vehicle. Refinancing a car for anything other than lowering the rate is not a good idea. Keep the same term, or take a shorter one. Remember that unlike real property, a car only loses value.  So when you make your payments on your 84 month (!) loan, those payments are amortized so that the interest is front loaded. The problem is, when your car gets totalled around month 24, insurance will generally only pay what the car is worth, and you'll owe more. Does the full time PHD student extend to 70-80 hours/week or more? If not, can you pick up an extra job to aid with living expenses? Also, whose name is the debt in? Is your wife paying to avoid the black mark on her credit record or her mother's? Basically what it looks like to me is that you guys currently have a car you cannot afford and that her mother doesn't seem to be able to afford either, at a ridiculous interest rate on top. Refinancing might be an option but at a payoff amount of 12k you're upside down even when it comes to the KBB retail value. I'm somewhat allergic to financing a deprecating asset (especially at a quick back of the envelope calculation suggests that she's already paid them around $18k if you are indeed three years into the loan). What I would be tempted to do in your situation is to attempt to negotiate a lower payoff to see if they're willing to settle for less and give you clean title to the car - worst thing they can say is no, but you might be able to get the car for a little less than the $12k, then preferably use your emergency money to pay off the car and put it up for sale. Use some of the money to buy her a cheaper car for, say, $4k-$5k (or less if you're mechanically inclined) and put the rest back into your emergency fund. The problem I see with refinancing it would be that it looks like you're underwater from a balance vs retail value perspective so you might have a problem finding someone to refinance it with you throwing some of your emergency money at it in the first place. There many car loans at zero percent interest.   Finance the car at zero percent, then take your money and invest it. If you want to be super safe buy a CD the same length as the car loan. 5 years you will get 2%.  If you still want safety and a better return take up a asset allocation strategy that moves your cash to risky assets when the market is performing well, then to cash, bonds, or cds when the market under-performs. Now you have your car with a zero percent loan and you are making the return on the money instead of the car company. Some things you missed in your analysis:   How will financing change your insurance costs?  I.e. what is the difference between the insurance that you would buy for yourself and what they require?   Note that it is possible that your insurance preferences are more stringent than the financing company's.  If so, this isn't a big deal.  But what's important is to consider if that's true.  Because if you'd prefer to drive with only the legal minimum insurance and they insist that you have full coverage with no more than a $1000 deductible, that's a significant difference.   Remember that you don't have $22.5k for six years.  You have an average of $10.5k (($22.5k + -$1500)/2) for six years.  Because you make payments ($24k) throughout.  So you start with $22.5k and subtract $333.33 a month until you reach -$1500.  That neglects both investment gains and potential losses.   It's not the $333 payment that will freak out mortgage companies.  It's the $24k debt.  But that's offset by your $22.5k in assets at the beginning.  And the car of course counts as an asset, albeit at lower than its sale value.  I.e. from the bank's perspective, paying $22.5k for a car out of savings is almost as bad as borrowing $24k for a car.  Both reduce your net worth.   Watch out for hidden fees.  In particular, 0% interest can often change into higher interest under certain circumstances.   If we assume a 7% return for the six years, that's about $1400 the first year and less each year after.  Perhaps $4500 over six years.  But you aren't going to get a 7% return if you keep $24,000 in a bank account in case you have to pay off the loan.  Instead, you'll get more like 1%, less than inflation.  Even five year Certificates of Deposit are only about 2%, right around inflation (1.9% for previous twelve months).   You can't keep the $24,000 in a securities account and be sure that it will be there when you need it.  If the market crashes tomorrow, your $24,000 might be worth $12,000 instead.  You'd have to throw in extra money from elsewhere.  Instead of making $4500 at the cost of $1500, you'd have paid $25,500 for $12,000.  Not a good deal.  So for your plan to work, that $24,000 needs to be in an account that won't fall in value.   You either need to compromise on the idea of a separate account that is always there when you need it, or you have to accept rather low returns.   Personally, I would prefer not to have the debt and not to pay extra on the insurance.  But that's me.  The potential investment returns are not worth it to me.  If you give up the separate account, you can make a few thousand dollars more.  But your risk is higher. I suggest you buy a more reasonably priced car and keep saving to have the full amount for the car you really want in the future. If you can avoid getting loans it helps a lot in you financial situation. "Let's assess the situation first, then look at an option: This leaves you with about $1,017/mo in cash flow, provided you spend money on nothing else (entertainment, oil changes, general merchandise, gifts, etc.) So I'd say take $200/mo off that as ""backup"" money. Now we're at $817/mo.  Question: What have you been doing with this extra $800/mo? If you put $600/mo of that extra towards the 10% loan, it would be paid off in 12 months and you would only pay $508 in interest. If you have been saving it (like all the wisest people say you should), then you should have plenty enough to either pay for a new transmission or buy a ""good enough"" car outright.  10% interest rate on a vehicle purchase is not very good. Not sure why you have a personal loan to handle this rather than an auto loan, but I'll guess you have a low credit score or not much credit history.  Cost of a new transmission is usually $1,700 - $3,500. Not sure what vehicle we're talking about, so let's make it $3,000 to be conservative.  At your current interest rate, you'll have paid another $1,450 in interest over the next 33 months just trying to pay off your underwater car.  If you take your old car to a dealership and trade it in towards a ""new to you"" car, you might be able to roll your existing loan into a new loan. Now, I'm not sure when you say personal loan if you mean an official loan from a bank or a personal loan from a friend/family-member, so that could make a difference. I'm also not sure if a dealership will be willing to recognize a personal loan in the transaction as I'd wager there's no lien against the vehicle for them to worry about. But, if you can manage it, you may be able to get a lower overall interest rate. If you can't roll it into a new financing plan, then you need to assess if you can afford a new loan (provided you even get approved) on top of your existing finances. One big issue that will affect interest rates and approvals will be your down payment amount. The higher it is, the better interest rate you'll receive. Ultimately, you're in a not-so-great position, but if your monthly budget is as you describe, then you'll be fine after a few more years. The perils of buying a used car is that you never know what might happen. What if you don't repair your existing car, buy another car, and it breaks down in a year? It's all a bit of a gamble. Don't let your emotions get in the way of making a decision. You might be frustrated with your current vehicle, but if $3,000 of repairs makes it last 3 more years, (by which time your current loan should be paid off), then you'll be in a much better spot to finance a newer vehicle. Of course it would be much better to save up cash over that time and buy something outright, but that's not always feasible.  Would you rather fix up your current car and keep working to pay down the debt, or, would you rather be rid of the car and put $3,000 down on a ""new to you"" car and take on an additional monthly debt? There's no single right answer for you. First and foremost you need to assess your monthly cash flow and properly allocate the extra funds. Get out of debt as soon as reasonably possible."