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Comment by tomschlick | Hacker News Reader

If you have good credit (>760) you can get 0% interest or close to it loans pretty regularly if you wait. At that point there is no reason for me not to take on the loan and just setup autopay.

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Yea, for sure. I got a 0.5% loan on my first car and had a moment when I had some spare cash and realized "Wait, I'm essentially being paid money to have this loan after inflation" and there was no reason to really pay it off quicker vs. just saving/investing the money.

What was your loan origination cost? Usually, when the rate is that low, the catch is that you paid $1k to $2k for the loan. This really annoys me...like, the higher interest rate with the lower loan fee would be OK since I'm going to pay the loan off quickly anyways.

Further to that, was the price agreed to before the salesman knew how you would paying, cash or credit?

You get the best deal (lowest total cost) by finding out which bank pays the highest financing incentives to the dealership (by asking the dealer), financing the car through them, then paying the whole loan off immediately. It’s all part of the negotiation.

Fascinating. Highest financing incentive suggests a commensurately high interest rate. Can we assume there's no pre-payment penalty hidden in the contract?

You should check, but generally pre-payment penalties on loans have become pretty rare.

what planet are you on? my credit meets your criteria and I am regularly asked to finance for 12% or more by everyone, including the bank and credit union where I store my money.

Did you try getting pre-approved for a car loan? If you applied, what rate did they offer?

Slightly OT: how long does it take to get a credit score of 750+ typically?

Someone I know who recently moved to US, claims his less-than-a-year credit line is already at 770. It sounds a bit dubious but I would like to hear some validation about it. For e.g. it took me 4 years (admittedly on a junior researcher salary) to get to 780, so it surprised me.

Immigrants get some kind of weird break on their credit history. My wife is a new immigrant, and she has higher credit than me even though our financial history has been intertwined ever since she came here. On the other hand, I got dinged a bit for not using any American-based credit for the 11 years I was out of country: we got married when I was living abroad, and I checked our credit scores when we moved to the states.

The way I look at it, likely seems based on some autoregressive type adaptive model. So having a couple of years of not using definitely dings it down. The score flattens off to some lower value. You keep using it well, pay back on time as good kid - you keep getting higher number. You wean off credit or stop using it - they tone it down.

But without spending thousands and repaying on- or before-time consistently over few financial quarters, how do some people manage to get so close to 800?

(Then, this is either a loophole or some kind of gaming the credit system ? This would be very exciting to understand, if it is)

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