New Car!!!

**Telephus44** · 12-30-2006, 11:05 PM

Friday we bought a car!!! Thursday night we looked online at the dealership inventory, and they had an '03 Honda Civic with 45,000 miles and an '04 Civic with 40,000 miles - both for $13,495. We went to the dealership for a test drive and to look at them and the '04 had $16,995 written on it. We showed them the print-out from the website and it turns out that they had just lowered the price the night before to try and sell it since it had been on the lot for 30 days. So that's the one we took. We went to our local credit union before going to the dealership and got pre-approved for the loan - I don't know what our limit was, but we showed them the print-outs from the website so we asked for $13,500 and the branch manager said that if we wanted to go a little higher we were already pre-approved so not to worry. They gave us a 5.5% rate, which is under their lowest rate listed on their website. Their website says as low as 6.25%, and a .5% discount if you have the payment automatically deducted from your checking account - and we're still a quarter point under that! When we were signing the papers the guy asked if we had our own financing, and I said yes. Then he asked what our rate was, because they could probably meet it or beat it. When I said 5.5% he got a surprized look on his face and said that we must have great credit and stopped pushing their financing. That made me feel pretty good! After our trade-in, sales tax, registration, etc. the total was $13,621.75 and we gave them a check for the $621.75, so we'll finance $13,000. We'll probably go with a 48 month loan, even though our credit union quoted us payments for a 60 month loan. We didn't end up closing because we our insurance agent closed early, and we need some paperwork from them for the bank to close the loan. So on Tuesday we'll call our insurance agent and tie up that end, get the check from the bank and drop it off at the car dealership, hopefully be able to pick up the car the same day, and then go back to our insurance agent to revise our policy to reflect the new car and take off the vehicle that we traded. So we now have a shiny '04 Honda Civic EX with a Sunroof and a CD player. And it gets 38 MPG. I'm going to try and attach a picture from the dealer website.