Just sharing a troubling experience for those out freshly discharged and considering the auto finance route. We recently went into a dealership with our newly issued discharge papers, down payment and all of the necessary stuff you need to apply with and essentially got sucker punched with an unpleasant amount of hard credit pulls.
Before deciding to finance, my wife and I accepted the conclusion that there would certainly be some inquiries and that's just the way things work. So my complaint isn't that there were hard pulls on our credit but rather the unscrupulous promises some dealerships will make to get your app through.
At the dealership, we made sure the salesman understood that it was equally important that our credit file take a minimal impact, as it was to get a decent finance offer. We explained that we were okay and understood that there would be 'hard' inquiries made but also made it known that we didn't want our app bouncing to lender after lender until an offer was made. The salesman assured us that they had a solid system that gets them the right lender within 2 inquiries to a maximum of 3 total inquiries.
I could live with 2-3 inquiries. It's the price you pay for gaining credit risk with a prospective lender.
What I did not expect however was for the dealerships 'solid' system to actually run myself and my wife through 13 (THIRTEEN) loan lenders. This, after the salesman stated there would only be 2 (TWO) to 3 (THREE) maximum. I didn't even know about this until I got home and opened my email to see alerts from both PrivacyGaurd and Credit Karma stating I had 13 new hard inquiries. 2 were from the dealership itself and 11 others from individual lenders.
Now, my purpose for this post isn't necessarily to get on here and whine about my decisions. However, I wanted to share a cautionary experience to people like me who are fresh out of CH7 and trying to rebuild. This is proof positive that dealerships will tell you anything in order to get you to authorize a credit app. They want to sell cars. I get that. Just do not take their word for it that your inquiries will be minimal. They can and will run your app through as many creditors as it takes to get the deal you want and in the same breath, lie to you about how they go about it.
I kept asking the salesman every time he came back from the finance room "Now you're sure you don't need to have any more pulls on my credit and that part is done right?". He would always answer "Oh yeah, we have what we need and if we need to negotiate further, we will just pick up the phone".
He lied.
Hard inquiries remain on your credit report for up to 2 years. While they do have a lower impact on your overall score, they do make up 15% of it. It does matter. Anyone who has ever been denied credit will likely to have seen "Too many inquiries" as a reason for denial.
Just beware that no matter how much the dealership says they understand your credit concerns, they only care about one thing: Selling you the car. Not your credit.
