UPDATE! UPDATE 7/1
Called back dcu the day after posting this thread and talked to someone in the us, who sounded he was from up north (like from maryland, where they are headquartered.) He played with some numbers and got us approved WITHOUT having to put any money up to offset our negative equity.
Granted, this isnt going to lower our payment by much, but instead 5.05, we are at 1.74 (so long as we auto pay the loan and have some sort of deposit going into the checking account every month).
Dcu was super easy to work with once we got to this point! Re-subscribed to my fico and found out our my scores (628 EQ, 617 TU, 631 EX, and much better than my fako scores.) and see how it contributed to the approval. Most importantly, we are saving substiantially on interest over the life of the loan, (about 4k) and now we have some recurring debt in my name as well, which helps with my S.O.'s debt to credit ratio and will continually help mine.
win win win. SO happy about this. Thanks for the input everyone!
So.
I heard of Dcu through the forums and have been in the midst of repairing credit for the last year and a half.
Currently, our 2015 Golf (which has a ton of negative equity financed into it) is at 5.05% through citizens auto finance. Since my credit has been on the mend, we decided it would be a good idea to attempt a refi, with my info on the loan. The golf (a NON tdi for those wondering) is currently in my S.o.'s name. This was a good opportunity to get some recurring payments, aside from credit cards, in my name as well, even if i was going to be just a co applicant.
So we submitted an application online through DCU. the entire process took a couple of weeks, since we techincally had to become members first by opening accounts. (which we did.) I'm curious as to how some folks got instant approvals, unless by instant you mean 'you're approved! now send us all this extra info!' which seems hardly instant.
Anywho, we uploaded all our documents and I took it upon myself to call their processing dept to find out what the deal was on the loan. The lady I spoke to, while nice enough, had a tone that made me question how long dcu would've left this application in an 'approved' status without actually contacting us about the terms.
So today, I spoke to someone in that dept, who left me on hold for awhile and asked for more specfiics about the car that werent on the document we uploaded with the vin number. She gets back on the line and says, we'll, we CAN approve you for the loan at your preferred term (which was 58 months, though we planned to do less) and she told us we were approved for the best rate available, which was 1.74%...on account of my s.o.'s credit. I'm not aware of our 'real' credit scores, just our fakos. Her TU is 731, mine is 606.
However, we were told that because of the negative equity in our vehicle, they would'nt be able to do it for the whole amount. (our outstanding payoff amount is 22329.30...like i said, a lot of negative equity and kind of a crappy rate, financed over 77 months.). She did however say that we could do 1 of two things; pay off the amount owed to bring it down to 17429.00 and they could do the loan for that time frame (significantly lowering our payment and interest rate.) OR take out a loan for that amount and make arrangements for the rest (a non-option for us, for obvious reasons.)
So we essentially have to put down 5k to make this happen. We DO have access to those types of funds.....we never bothered to put it down when we got the car, just because we were able to finance it and get it off the lot without having to put anything down. We have never put that much money towards the current loan, because figured the only reason to do so was in hopes of a refi,which until now, didnt seem like a possibility. The funds themselves aren't just in a checking account; we'd be pulling them out ofa 401k that was through a previous employer that we no longer contribute to; it just kind of sits there. (we do have another 401k that we actively contribute to every pay period, automatically.)
Is the information DCU has given us solid enough to go on to take that step and withdraw the funds? We put a lot of miles on our vehicle and i'm personally leery of having a car, (especially a vw that has already started to show off some interesting 'quirks' and has already lost value because of diesel gate, despite not being a tdi), that by the time we pay it down enough on the current loan, we will have accumulated an insane amount of miles and the general cost of ownership will have gone through the roof. (VW's, while not the ticking time bombs they used to be, are still more expensive to maintain than your average honda or toyota.)
Any thoughts on this? We'd love to make this happen, but I'd hate to put that much money down and then for whatever reason, not have the loan go through....which i guess if that was the case, we would've already been shot down right? Right?
