Short story: we got approved today for a refi of our 2017 Civic which we purchased in Dec. 1.99% for 48 months!
Longer story: we bought a Volvo in April, trading in my Pilot and financed through Penfed. They offered us a lower rate than NFCU and DCU turned us down altogether. Since then, I've been waiting for the loan on the Pilot to show up as paid in full. During this time, the last baddies fell off dh's report entirely, so his FICOs are all mid-high 700s. The Civic was financed in dh's name alone as my scores are significantly lower, especially 6 months ago. However, I'm the primary wage earner so I was concerned about DTI for the refi and didn't want his CR to show 3 open auto loans.
Anyway, equifax finally updated to show the paid TL so he app'd for the refi. It was referred for review but soon I saw the online status updated to show they were asking for docs. I was pretty confident it was an approval, esp when he got a message with the 'risk based pricing'. However, the notice listed his credit score as 680, the same as when we got the Volvo loan in April. I know they use their own scoring model not FICO 08 but still... We called in and talked to customer service and were told we were approved at 3.29%. We then asked if a new CR had been pulled, explaining that dh's scores had significantly improved in the last few months and dh gave permission for a new credit pull. We were put on hold while the loan officer was consulted and when he came back, our rate was now at 1.99%! Needless to say, we are thrilled. Our original loan was at 60 months but we elected to refi for 48 months. Our payment is a tiny bit more than before but we will pay off the car 8 months sooner.
I know it's been said here on the forums that Penfed only uses one credit pull for so many days but I applied for their cash rewards card right after we got the other car loan through them in April and they did pull my CR a 2nd time. So sometime they will, and sometimes they won't!
