Without going much into details, here’s a little story from my last week.

A bit ago, I decided that it would be nice if I had a newer car. Much as I love the old one, it seemed time for something different. Given my debt load--which is significantly higher than it should be--I wasn’t sure what kind of loan I was going to come away with. Would the limit be high enough for what I wanted? Would the rate be low enough to keep me feeling that happy, unscrewed feeling? I was pretty sure that the answer to one or the other was going to end up being “no.”

I was very wrong. In fact, I had pre-qualified myself with Capital One auto loans (they had carried my last car loan) and been given a rate of 5.76%, which sounded like a solid deal to me. The guy who helped us with our loan at Tynan’s VW here in Aurora looked over my credit report promised that he could do better. He did. I ended up with a JP Morgan/Chase loan at just 4.99%

Not bad.

I’m not writing this just to be writing, though, there’s an actual point. The point is that, if you were thinking about a new car but worried that the current credit climate might shut you out of a decent deal, you might want to take a look. The prices are low and there are good deals to be had (especially with the new cars, although I chose the 2008 to keep my payments down and get immediately past the massive depreciation that comes in the first few years of car ownership).