An Exercize in Futility

I have tried this before. I am trying it again. Nothing I can do works.

I'm trying to get a car loan on my own in college.

I don't talk to my father for personal reasons, and my mother flat-out refuses to cosign because it "wouldn't do any good". It would, but she just doesn't want to drag her post-divorce credit score through any more dirt. I do wish she'd be honest with me and just say that though. That's a rant for another post.

It is impossible. I tried once before, with a car about three or four thousand dollars, to get a loan. Nothing worked. This time, I'm putting a $3000 down payment on a $7000 car (before tax, title, registration, f*cking warranty sold to me by a guy who was to nice for me to say no to, etc). Nothing will grease the wheels of commerce enough for me to get a loan, however small, through the dealership's banks. I'll try my own bank, of course, but I don't expect much.

If nothing else, I'll do the same thing I did to pay for my first semester of college - scrounge every drop of savings and credit I have anywhere. I've tallied, and it should come up to just enough if I scratch the warranty, which I kind of want to do anyways. I might need a bit of cash, but with any luck I can scrounge a few hundred dollars up here or there.

The biggest thing is, though, it's impossible for me to get even a modest car loan. My credit score is in the bottom end of 700, so it's not abysmal, and I've got a pretty good history of paying everything off, maybe one or two missed payments here and there on my credit cards. Other than that, I try to have them as close to completely square by the end of the month.

I just can't get a loan for a decent car, which is something I need to be able to do my job as a pizza deliverer. I don't know why the system is set up like this, but it seems that the world is financially against me just because I'm in college. Yes, it is a financially turbulent time in my life, and yes, I don't have much of a history other than a credit card with my bank and a series of student loans not yet in repayment, but that doesn't mean I'm automatically bad news. The banks assume that because I don't have much experience, I don't know what I'm doing, which means that I can't get a strong credit history.

The system is, like so many other systems, inherently flawed and useful only in educating ourselves not to be. It is also the best system we've come up with yet. A Nobel Prize in Economics (which, interestingly, is not a real Nobel Prize) to the person who comes up with a better judge of who will repay loans. Maybe we just need to institute Microloans here and have them count towards our credit history.

TRH