Auto loans

New, used, and — the one most people should be asking about — refinancing a loan you already have.

The loan you already have

Most people finance a car at the dealership, on the day, at the end of several hours of negotiating about something else. That is the worst possible moment to compare terms, and everyone in the building knows it.

Which is why refinancing is the quietest useful thing we do. If your loan came from a dealer and you have made payments on time for a year, the terms available to you now are frequently better than the ones you took then. The paperwork takes an afternoon. A lot of members are surprised by what it changes about a monthly payment, and mildly annoyed nobody mentioned it sooner.

Before you buy

Come and get approved before you go to the lot, not after. A pre-approval turns the financing conversation from something done to you into something you have already settled. You walk in as a cash buyer, and the negotiation is about the car.

This is free, it takes a day or two, and it is the single most useful thing we can do for a member about to buy a vehicle.

What we look at

• Whether the payment fits your actual month, not a theoretical one.
• Your history with us, which counts for more here than it would elsewhere — we can see it, and a person reads it.
• The vehicle, because a fifteen-year-old truck and a two-year-old sedan are not the same loan.

A credit score is part of it and it is not the whole of it. If something on your file has an explanation, tell us the explanation. At a large lender that is a wasted breath because no human reads it. Here it is read.

Rates

Not published here, deliberately — see the note on our home page. Auto rates in particular move with the market and with term length, and a single number on a web page would be wrong for most of the people reading it. Call a branch and you will get today's, for your situation.