[old and tired]

THREE DAYS late on a payment?

The car is 9 years old. She has a >$350 payment on a nine year old car minivan. I'm just guessing, but I think she was more than 1 month late.

[ladyjane]

You don’t have a $350 a month payment on a nine year old cold.

I suspect there is a long history of very bad decisions.

[Vigilanteman]

Possible. But I'm reading the facts as written. I know a guy who had to pay 18% on a truck which he needed to do his work. Yeah, 18%, because his credit was that bad.

Decent guy, hard worker but got clobbered with medical bills. It is insane. I'm making less than a $300 monthly payment on a 2013 model because I was able to make a substantial down payment and have so-so credit. Good for me, but not everyone can do that.

It is possible she is being clobbered like my friend with a hugely unrealistic interest rate. FWIW, he was able to refi and got that rate down to 8% or so by paying down his bills. Still not nice, but much better.

[biff]

The place is probably a “note lot”, you know, “we tote the note”. How they operate is they buy crap cars at auctions. Lets say they paid $1,500.00 for a 9 year old van. They sell it for 3 grand with 1500 down and they carry the note at 10 or 15%, usually with weekly payments. You miss by a day or three and the repo man picks it up, and they re-sell the car again after 30 days. First buyer loses all.

I worked for a repo guy for about three months until I could not stand it any more. The industry is so full of crooks that take huge advantage of folks that are having tough times just getting by. Look for increased advertising around tax time, note lots have their biggest months at tax time grabbing that unearned income tax return checks.

Usually those checks are spend for cars, clothes, jewelry, booze, drugs and most other crap that are not needed. You know, like pedicures.