Buying a car

Looking at buying a new car. Intimidated by the complexity of the process and the number of ways in which one can pay thousands of dollars. Picking the car isn’t hard. redmed will simply do her usual brilliant thing and pick the best one. It’s the money side of the process that’s worrying me.

Looked at Howstuffworks on financing and howstuffworks on buying a car, as well as consumer reports, plus checked out the Kelly Blue Book for competitive pricing, and my bank for interest rates (6.5%ish, right now). Then I read nearly the entirety of carbuyingtips.com.

So far what I’ve got is:

• Shop for financing independent of shopping for the car. It’s possible that the dealership will have a good loan product, but it’s doubtful.
• Know the terminology (invoice vs. MSRP and so on)
• Know your credit score. There are a freakin’ lot of imposter sites out there. However, this is totally simple, you see the report instantly, and you can print it out. You don’t get the *score* per se…but you get all the information that goes into it.
• Get all paranoid and quit. No no no…but this is creeping me out.

I think that my plan (subject, of course to the other half of the plan’s approval) is to shop for all the various parts of this equation separately. Get financing, buy the new car, sell the old car. They’re distinct questions, and I can treat them as such.

Oh yeah, and: MY FREAKING ADDRESS IS WRONG ON MY CREDIT REPORT!!!! VALHALLA, I AM COMING!!!!!!!

We’ve been doing this idiot dance with the post office, ever since moving to RI, trying to convince them to forward mail addressed to the previous occupant (who is now mentally incompetent), but keep delivering our mail. This has resulted in a three-stooges-like series of idiocies as my credit cards and various other companies get notified that I’ve changed my address and automatically update my address to the incorrect one. Right now we’ve got it kinda sorta under control. I’ve spoken to high ranking people at the post office and with my credit card companies and there are notes attached to my file in both places such that if they see anything that would automatically cause them to change the address, they call me before doing so. Plus, there is a forward in effect from the incorrect address back to the correct one, so it should work itself out.

But the GDMF credit reporting agencies have the wrong address on file. Grrrrrrrr.