How Is THAT For a Quick Payoff?

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By the end of the week I will have paid off my car loan. Okay, asterisk. The dealership had a “special price” for financing through their financing company. At first I thought that’d be great, because I’ve had two cars through Honda Financial Services before. It turns out that the dealership I bought my car from didn’t use Honda Financial. They used Wells Fargo. As in, one of the biggest data breaches in history Wells Fargo. Well, I went ahead and took the loan because it’s a couple of thousand dollars in difference. (What happens, from what I’ve read, is that the dealership gets a percentage of the interest rate kicked back to them from the “preferred lender” being used.) But almost immediately I called my credit union to see about getting the car refinanced. Yesterday I finally got my title in the mail. This morning I dropped it off at the credit union. Almost immediately I had a bunch of papers in my email inbox to sign electronically for the loan approval. What are the benefits? I get another month off (August) from car payments. The payment went down a whopping — wow, what can I do with this money — $18 a month. Yeah, that’s not much, except spread out over the life of the loan. Then it becomes $1,300. (Or, the price of my trip to Florida last February.) Very significantly for me, the money is now local. It’s out of a big corporation bank and in a local credit union. I’ve been a member of that credit union for nearly 30 years, and the personal service you can get locally (even with a mask on, the tellers know me) is priceless. Most importantly, when the next data breach at Wells Fargo happens it won’t be my account in danger. From Ben Vaughn: