Allen K

iTrader: (4)

Honestly, 66% credit utilization scares me more than the serious delinquency unless your cards have low limits attached to them

mjeds

even with low limits $12K in CC debt @ 66% means that most of the cards are probably maxed or close to maxed.

Aron9000

I was about to say the same thing. What are you driving now and is it paid off? If your current car is a real POS that needs more in repairs than its worth, go slum it up and lease a new Kia Rio, Honda Fit, etc for $150 a month for a year or two until you get all that credit card debt paid off. Also I do have an unsecured line of credit with my bank that I have used before, interest rate was 7%, might be better than what the credit card companies are charging you.

litesoarer

Debt is all relative.

When I applied for a loan from Penfed and Navy Federal I had about $18,000 on CCs reporting (Half of it is furniture on a 0% promo), but we pay our non promo rate CCs off in full monthly when the statement arrives.
The difference here is that $18K was out of a total of $375K in revolving credit available for a utilization ratio of less than 5%, versus oh say, $18K out of 25K which would be about 75%

dseag2

Totally agree. Not sure why someone with debt delinquencies and a subpar credit rating needs to go for a '16 RX. Maybe an NX? Even better, an Acura RDX or Mazda CX-5 to keep the payments down?

rld14

With a 680 you should be a tier 3, if you have previously well paid autos you might get a tier 1 exception but again I am not looking at your bureau.

Now, if you paid Toyota/Lexus all sloppy then you may get flat turned down.

SW17LS

Really what they care about is the score. They're not going to look deep enough to see utilization of credit cards, etc. The score fits into one of the tiers, and they go from there.

The only time they would look deep enough to look at ratios, verify income, is on a harder loan that was manually underwritten.

litesoarer

Utilization of credit and credit mix are factored into score.

I'm usually sitting between 780 and 800 depending on the bureau.

SW17LS

Right, what I'm saying is they're not looking at your score AND your utilization. The score is what matters.

Same way for a mortgage. If you have a 750, you have a 750. If you have 25% or 85% utilization it doesn't matter. All that matters is your debt to income ratio on top of score. That matters for a car loan too, but to a lesser degree.

Chocolate

Here's a bold idea: call your local dealer and ask them?

Chocolate

Once you have paid off more of your debt, ask for a credit limit increase on your cards to lower utilization.

SW17LS

Why mess with the dealer when we're here to help? Thats what the forum is for...

DaveGS4

iTrader: (2)

Not intended to put down the inputs of our members (myself included), but he's simply getting opinion here. The dealer can give him a much more definitive answer based on the rules they have to follow for the lease approval. They're loaning him the money, not us (or at least I'm not signing up for that )

SW17LS

The issue is that the dealer is going to try and close him on a deal or bring him in for an appointment, they're going to want to run it for him and get him an approval without really explaining to him how it all works. IMHO everybody is way better off learning everything that they can learn before they ever get to a point where they talk to somebody at the dealer.

If the finance guy at the dealer feels he's concerned about utilization, they can use that as justification for jacking up the rate or money factor. "I could have given you that but with your utilization so high" when thats not a factor at all.

The other part of it is that quite frankly...the vast majority of people at dealers I've found aren't very knowledgable themselves... Between the lot of us we've all leased and financed a lot of cars through LFS from a wide variety of credit profiles, etc. I'd put way more stock in the info that comes from CL than from the staff at a dealer.

DaveGS4

iTrader: (2)

Don't disagree with the learning part.

Do disagree he'll get an answer here. Only the dealer can tell him if he'll be approved.