Has her credit improved enough over the 9 years to get a decent rated loan now?
As mentioned above if at all possible do not put a single cent into fixing that Yaris.
Cuz the vehicle’s a 95K 10-year-old base model 2WD Yaris that, even if it weren’t for the moderate hail damage to the roof panel, is only worth about. . . $4000.
I did a basic KBB on a 2010 Yaris with 95k miles. In Fair condition it’s only showing $2k in value.
I think I was doing trade in, that may have messed with it.
Anyway, her credit did start to improve after a few years of living together, which let us move from the lease to the loan four years ago.
Unfortunately, not long after that, she fell very ill, flunked out of grad school, and was more or less homebound for the better part of two years. She defaulted on a bunch of debt during that time and is still struggling to get back on her feet, so if anything, her credit is actually worse now.
Realistically, if we need another car and an auto loan to go with, it would be enormously better to just do it all in my name only (apart from her needing to someday do something to rebuild her credit, but I’d rather start small with a new credit card that I manage for her, plus getting her student loans out of collections, or similar).
Anyway, I wouldn’t mind doing the loan for her, but I’m pretty worried my own vehicle isn’t gonna make it another 4-5 years, at which point I’LL be looking at buying…
Dunno. If I can wear her down to going Certified Pre-owned, and we can find someplace that’ll give us more than pocket lint for the Yaris, maybe we can just pay straight cash for a several year old vehicle for now. Though that’s a hell of an expensive bandaid.
I don’t know if you have a CarMaxx near you but we shopped there for my daughters car. She bought used, low mileage and has driven it for almost 5 years without any mechanical problems. A Hyundai.Elantra. They do their own financing and will even make an offer on your old car, although yours may be in no shape for that.
Something that hasn’t made much sense to me throughout all of this:
We leased the ~$15k car for 5 years, fully owned by Toyota Financial Services. Paid a fuckload of money every month for the privilege of borrowing their car!
At the end of that period, we went in and, as far as I recall, received financing from the local Lexus/Toyota dealer for the remaining ~$7k or whatever was left in assessed value of the vehicle, and my partner started paying a much reduced payment to them to work that down, of which $1,600 is left.
However, from what she’s said, the Title lists our names only. We were able to switch insurance to Liability-only without Toyota pitching a shitfit while she was sick and unemployed.
So. . . if we try to sell this sucker for parts, say, Monday, how does Toyota get involved? Do we need to pay it off via their website and wait the 10-15 days for the title beforehand (which their website says is the standard procedure, even though it looks like our current title is in our names only)? Do they get pissed if we try to sell it without getting the final payments made first, when they find out we totaled “their” car without comprehensive insurance? Do they come after us legally?
Moreover, assuming the cost to get it drivable is higher than the value of the vehicle, so we opt to do no repairs, and want to sell it for parts and need to wait the 2 weeks for Toyota Financial to sign it over to us fully, or whatever: what do we do with the car in the meantime? The wreck was out by her job, 25 miles away, and it’s at a body shop a couple of miles from there. Do we need to pay hundreds to have it towed back to our apartment, then pay to have it towed again to whatever scrap shop decides to buy it when we’re legally clear to sell it? Cuz at that point, we might be approaching a cost similar to getting the car “technically drivable without it exploding.”
I’d call Toyota and ask. I am sure they want their money asap. Then the title is yours and you can do as you wish with the car.
The title may be in your names, but the one who holds the paper is the vehicle holder.
Your tow costs seem really high, last time I had a 40 mile tow it costs around $160.
For what it’s worth, I am mostly trying to run under Toyota’s radar right now, in case we managed to total a car they contractually required us to have comprehensive insurance on, that we didn’t :)
And the tow cost was a quick back-of-the-envelope guestimate based off a couple of different tows I’ve had done recently. If it were that small, I think we’d weather it a lot better.
Usually if someone owes money on a car the pink slip will say something about a Lienholder. I have had to visit the DMV to have that removed before selling a vehicle because some lienholders are better than others at sending in paperwork. I think we had a truck that Ford Credit failed to release and I had to get paperwork from them prior to selling the vehicle. If no lienholder is shown someone may have screwed up and not got that done when you bought the car.
You may have addressed this already, but does your/her insurance company possibly pay for part or all of a tow?
I just have liability on my own vehicle, but I think I pay like hardly anything for towing service. It’s like a few dollars every six months, and they will pay for 100% of a local tow, and the first $50 of a longer tow. I’ve never had to use it, but my girlfriend has, and she just presented the towing bill to her insurance company, and they wrote her a check on the spot. It also works for a jump-start.
It may be worth a phone call to your/her insurance company to find out if you’re covered for something like this.
AAA charges $60 a year for membership that includes towing. You don’t even have to have insurance with them. But I think there towing has a mileage limit that Armando would have exceeded.
Yeah, sorry, juggling lots. We do have AAA, but it also has a pretty strict limit of free tows at our level. Like 3mi. The per mile charge isn’t too crazy after that, it turns out. More than I’d like to pay routinely to schlep the car around fifteen different times, but two would be manageable.
Hope this helps.
