New Online Platform Aims To Help Car Loan Borrowers Negotiate Better

Buying a car can be a hassle, especially for those who never asked for a loan before. Most people, 76 percent, haggle over the purchase price of the car with seller, but only 31 percent negotiate their loan’s interest rate, which means they're losing money.

A new platform, created by SuperMoney, is trying to make it easier for car buyers to negotiate their interest rate by using an online application.

SuperMoney, announced this week its “auto loan offer engine” that allows people to choose what financing options work better for them. The platform compares interest rates, similar to how you check out flight prices online.

The Importance Of Negotiating Your Loan

About 27 percent of car buyers said the monthly payment on their loan was the most important factor, according to a survey by the Federal Reserve, and 6.1 percent said their interest rate on their loan was the most important. While most people tend to worry about negotiating the total price of the car, failing to negotiate a high interest rate can cost more than what buyers ended up taking off the purchase price.

For example, a $35,000 car loan with 3 percent APR will cost you $37,734 over the life of a 60-month loan. Meanwhile, the same loan with a 7 percent APR will cost $41,583, which means you’ll be losing nearly $4,000.

“Most people don’t realize what a huge impact a few percentages points can have on your total cost of ownership,” SuperMoney CEO Miron Lulic told International Business Times. “Negotiating the purchase price is a lot more tangible so they focus their negotiations there. Secondly, most people don’t realize they have options.”

According to SuperMoney, there are two main reason why people overpay in financing costs when buying a car: lack of transparency on available rates and not understanding the actual cost of auto financing.

Dealers know most people who are looking for a car loan tend to focus on the wrong things. Auto dealerships can hide interest hikes behind longer terms because they know people like to focus on the monthly payments instead of the total cost.

To check out loans using SuperMoney’s new platform, people can go online and fill out a simple, quick form with questions like, what car they want to purchase, how much they have for down payment and information on where they are employed. The online application takes about a minute, and is pre-filtered by extensive segmentation algorithms. The information is then submitted to matching SuperMoney lending partners “almost instantaneously,” Lulic said.

People then receive personalized rates from various lenders, which can give them some advantage to negotiate with lenders when purchasing a car.

Car buyers also don’t have to worry about their credit score, since SuperMoney’s lending partners do a soft credit pull.

“Our lending partners do a soft credit-pull, evaluate the loan application and return competing loan offers within seconds,” Lulic explained to IBT. “These offers are all aggregated and displayed in our comparison interface that allows users to easily filter and sort by APR, loan amount, payment, total cost, term, and more.”

Lulic pointed out there are many websites that list “a bunch of static teaser rates from online lenders” in a comparison chart, or setup to sell off a buyer’s data to the highest bidder, and some who capture a customer’s data and try to broker a loan offline.

“Where SuperMoney differs is that we have directly integrated with our lending partners to shoot back real offers, in real time,” said Lulic. “Essentially, we’ve made shopping for an auto loan as easy as shopping for an airline ticket.”