Beautify Your Credit before Buying a Car

3 Easy Steps to Getting a Better Car Loan:

Buying a car on credit is a long-term commitment easily be regretted if you’re not careful. If you learn a few wise steps before going to the dealership, you can save yourself embarrassment, time haggling, and hundreds or thousands of dollars. Taking care of some credit issues is something that can be done (and reported on your credit) fairly quickly - often within a couple of weeks - if you have the patience to wait for your big shopping and purchase day.

Get your Credit Report
Your credit score can be easily obtained online from various sites or directly from the agencies Experian, TransUnion or Equifax. Once you have it, you are armed with the tool you need to make small, quick corrections that could give you the advantage in negotiations for a car price and loan.
Take Care of the ‘Small’ Dings in Your Credit.
It turns out that most Americans with less-than-perfect credit have less-than-perfect credit due to minor issues like not having paid a certain bill due to moving or some other honest reason. Perhaps a bill is on your credit unfairly. The key is, once you know about these issues, you can act quickly to pay down the smaller, legitimate ones or get the other non-legitimate ones removed from your credit report.
Notify the Credit Reporting Agencies and Wait.
Once you’ve paid off some of the small, outstanding debts, you should notify the credit-reporting agencies immediately (you could even send them a copy of the check and bill you sent) that the issue has been handled and that you would like the item removed from your report ASAP. In many cases, it is a good idea to send a note to the creditor with the payment and indicate that you want them to report the payment to the credit agencies immediately as well.

Taking the time to make even one or two small corrections on your credit report could have the effect of increasing your score by a few dozen points, which could encourage the bank or credit union offering your car loan to reduce the interest rate and save you hundreds or thousands of dollars in interest over the life of your loan. Working part-time for a couple of weeks could net you $1,000 or more! Not bad!