Report Abuse

“Ok ....but if you can get mainstream credit go...”

written by mark2828 on 05/03/2015

Having just come out of an IVA my options were quite limited to finding a company willing to let me get car finance , not because of not affording the payments but because my credit was ruined due to previous issues sadly making me go down the IVA route ... Anyway enough woe is me about that ...

I desperately needed to change my car as my old 17 year old jeep grand cherokee 4.0 petrol although fun to drive and look at was sadly costing me a small fortune in petrol ( 18-19 mpg ) and pretty much everything that could go wrong on the old beast did and then it failed the MOT , so I started looking at sub prime credit car financing companies and found that they are all pretty similar high APR , limited choice of cars etc etc , HUGE deposits so after a few days of looking I stumbled across credit 4 cars / credit car sales in essex ,

I looked on the website found a car that actually seemed pretty good although probably £1500 overpriced but I wanted another 4x4 and it needed to be automatic and this was 10 years newer than my old car I filled in an online application and I think by default got accepted then 20 minutes later got a all from a nice enough sales guy who gave some some figures and bearing it mind they deal with bad credit the deposit was pretty low £400 in my case and the figures added up but still an eye watering 62% APR which basically means I will pay for the car twice over in 3 years ... I decided that I will take a punt on the car as looking at sub prime market I was pretty limited I paid £100 deposit to take the car off sale with the remaining deposit to be paid upon collection I was then emailed a check list to send bank statements , wage slips etc etc after about 48 hours of phone calls to the finance department asking if I was hiding money in a Swiss bank account ....if I was I wouldn't be using a sub prime company they approved my application and then another staff member contacted me from the collections department

Now this bit was not explained n the website ... I thought I was picking the car up from essex I live in kent so not a big deal but the car I brought once prepared was actually in there Derbyshire branch and they kindly told me that it was going to cost £150 delivery charge on top of the deposit .... Not willing to pay even more I decided to collect from Derbyshire which worked with petrol and a train ticket about £60 and a day of travelling so something to be aware of .... The car itself is really nice no problems so I have no complaints

So to actually have point to this review ..yes they will lend to bad credit , yes the cars are overpriced , they fit your car with a tracker and immobiliser so if you fail to pay they disable your car ( so try not to do that) , they keep the spare key til you pay the balance

So taking all that into consideration if you can get a car loan normally go elsewhere however if you can afford the payments and are struggling to get credit then by all means give them a go ... Apparently you can upgrade your car after 18 months so I will see how that pans out ... I have owned this car now for 4 months apart from an issue getting the V5 which was the DVLAs fault as much as the car company it has been ok