Your credit is important when you’re looking to buy a new or used car in Philadelphia. There are a lot of things that people do to hurt their credit and don’t even know it.
There are things that you could be doing currently that are keeping your credit score low and this can impact your ability to purchase a new or used car.
- Paying cash this can believe or not hurt your credit score if you do it all the time. Using cash all the time doesn’t allow for you to build up a credit score. You might want to get into the habit of using your credit card maybe once a month to help build that score up. Keep spending on the card to a minimum a lot of people use a credit card for gas purposes.
- Don’t close old credit cards you want to keep those lines of credit open even if you don’t use them. This shows that even if you don’t have a balance on the credit card you can be responsible with a credit limit spending.
- Don’t want to max out your credit cards. This shows lenders that you can’t be responsible with a credit limit and can’t pay the amount owed on time. Lenders want to see that you can pay loans back. So keeping your ratio low can help you boost your credit score.
- Don’t co-sign on an auto loan if you don’t have to because if the friend or person makes late payments or defaults on the auto loan that will also show up on your credit report too. So be careful about who you co-sign for.
- If you’re going through a divorce and you have joint accounts you want to make payments on those accounts until your name is taken off those accounts. A court order doesn’t matter. Your credit report will still say you made late payments on the accounts even if they weren’t your responsibility.
Keeping your credit score high is a beneficial way to buy a new or used car and one of the most important factors that car dealerships in Philadelphia look at before issuing the auto loan. This also goes for other lenders that you deal with in the future.
The only car dealerships that don’t look at credit scores usually buy here pay here dealers in Philadelphia but they want a large down payment for used cars instead and usually don’t report very much on credit.