Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
People ask me this one a lot — usually after they’ve already tried a dealer and gotten a rough quote. The short answer is yes, you can lease a car with bad credit. The longer answer is that it’ll cost you more, and knowing exactly why gives you a real shot at changing that before you sign anything.
Continue reading “Can you lease a car with bad credit? What to actually expect”
Buyers ask me this fairly often — usually people trying to figure out whether to take on a car loan specifically to build credit, or whether they should focus on something else. The short answer: do car loans build credit? Yes, they do — but they build a specific kind of credit history, and if you’re working with a thin file, there are faster tools for the pieces that matter most.
People ask me this mostly after the damage is already done — the car’s gone, the lender’s reported it, and now they’re trying to figure out how bad this is going to be. The answer is seven years, and unfortunately that part doesn’t have a workaround. But understanding what those seven years actually look like is more useful than the headline number suggests.
Not an Italian luxury car.
No. Pareto was the Italian economist that came up with the 80/20 rule. He figured out 20% of the richest families held 80% of the wealth (this is probably worse nowadays). More generally stated, the 80/20 rule says that 80% of the results come from 20% of the inputs, you spend 80% of your time doing 20% of your tasks, etc, etc.
