New car; loans and dealers

[Caladan 19]

So, one of the things that comes up here is establishing credit for a spouse. I figured I'd post our recent adventure in securing a car loan for the general edification.

When C. moved down here, we got him a secured credit card through Bank of America. It has a low limit, and he pays it off in full monthly. That was about sixteen months ago.

We've pulled his credit report, but the agencies are unable to determine a score because of such a short history. We can see the record of timely payments; it's just not long enough, so he counts as "no credit."

Anyhow. This meant, in this era of tightening credit, that even with my excellent credit rating, we were turned down for a car loan at Bank of America. We ended up going through the dealer's financing and secured a reasonably good rate, and he mentioned a couple of things that might be of interest.

1) We were turned down at a number of banks before we found one that was willing to approve it and look at income, not just credit history.

2) The dealer said they used to be able to pull Canadian credit history; with the tightening credit market, that's no longer their policy. I have no idea how generalizable this is, but I thought it was interesting.

Anyhow, the story ends happily. But I thought it might be an interesting data point.

[Otto 83]

The credit/credit-rating system in the US is a horrible system...