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Archive for March, 2011

I just saved $596!

March 17th, 2011 at 04:38 pm

First a little background: we decided to sell our paid for Jeep Grand Cherokee this past August in order to buy a much larger Chevy Suburban. It was mostly a business decision since I needed to be able to put 5 car seats in a vehicle and the Suburban was the only thing big enough. I do in-home daycare and needed to be able to transport the kids to/from pre-school, but couldn't justify a vehicle this big as being solely a work vehicle so it would have to double as our family vehicle. We found a great used truck but it still set us back $23k @ 5.25% and added a $443 car payment that we didn't have before.

That was 8 payments ago. Today, I noticed on our credit union's website that they are offering a special low interest rate of 3.99% for used cars; our interest rate from August was 5.25% so I called to see if we could refinance the loan to the lower rate and how much it would cost. Good news! For a 1-time fee of $85 we could "buy down" the rate keeping our term AND payments the same, so we would just be paying off the loan faster. Over the remaining payments this will save us $681 in interest and get the loan paid off in 2 fewer months! Less the $85 fee, that puts us $596 ahead and cuts 2 months off the snowball without have to put more money in each month.