Your vehicle is your gateway to the world, offering you the freedom to go where you want to, when you want you. It takes you to your workplace each day, carries your family to all their important events, and it’s a useful workhorse for hauling all your shopping home.
Auto Bank’s perspective on Kansas City auto sales makes us one of the top buy here pay here car dealerships in the area. We’re best known for our large range of used cars and convenient, straightforward financing, all completed in-house.
If you’re buying a used car in Kansas City from a dealership with financing (as opposed to purchasing outright with cash or buying privately), you have two main choices.
You can get traditional financing, which comes from a third-party lender such as a bank or credit union, or you can choose a buy here pay here dealership, where you get financing directly.
Buy here pay here is a process where the entire car finance plan is handled by the dealership from start to finish. You will make payments to the car dealership directly, and no third party is involved.
Note that some traditional dealerships will offer to arrange car financing for you using an in-house team, but they still use a third party to get the funds. So, used car dealerships that can arrange financing for you are not necessarily buy here pay here dealerships.
Third-party financing means you’re still getting a loan from a bank or credit union, but the finance department at the dealership does the legwork for you while you sit and wait. It can be convenient, but you’re at someone else’s mercy to choose the best possible loan terms for you.
One of the biggest reasons people choose buy here pay here financing is the incredible convenience compared to the traditional financing approach. Trying to buy a used car with traditional financing can be like pulling teeth, as there are many steps to the process, all of which can fall through, and your credit score takes a hit every time you request more information about a car loan.
First, with traditional lending, banks will use your credit rating to decide whether you are eligible to get a loan in the first place. Credit ratings have been shown to be relatively poor indicators of whether a person will have the ongoing funds to make their monthly car repayments. This hasn’t stopped traditional lenders from using it as their gold standard for deciding how much risk there is in lending to an individual and how much interest to charge them. If you have had credit challenges in the past, traditional car financing may not be possible for you.
Second, having additional third parties involved in the process greatly complicates the sale. By the time you’ve secured approval for a used car purchase using this slow approach, the bargain that was on the car lot near you may have already been snapped up. And each time you want to buy a different used vehicle, the process starts again, with each lender requiring a laborious process of proving the value of the vehicle you’ll buy and requiring extensive proof of your ability to repay the loan.
Arguably the most important reason to choose buy here pay here car financing is it’s open to a much wider set of people. Those with poor or fair credit ratings (which makes up around a third of the American population) will struggle to get a loan from a bank, but they’ll have no problem getting a loan from a buy here pay here dealership.
Buy here pay here dealerships, on the most part, don’t care about credit rating. They are autonomous and make their own financial decisions. They can be much more lenient about who they offer car financing to, and will typically make financing available to anyone who has proof they can make the repayment each month. Essentially, you need only to bring a few recent pay stubs, and you will be approved.
If you have tried over and over again to get approval for a car loan through a bank, but you’ve not been successful, don’t give up! Auto Bank takes Kansas City auto sales to a whole new level, offering in-house financing to people just like you, who deserve a reliable vehicle, regardless of your credit score.
With two convenient locations in Kansas City - on East Truman Road and East Front Street - you can shop for a used car at our buy here pay here dealerships and leave in your new-to-you ride the very same day.
Call us to learn more about what you need to bring along when you shop with us. We can’t wait to meet you.