Car Finance: Getting the best deal

**Collaborative post**

There are some things in life that you wish you had been taught in school, and how personal credit works is possibly one of them.

Your credit score is so vital to adult life – it affects the purchase of many important assets (OK, and some not so important ones), with a house probably being the most expensive of these.

How good your credit score is will also play a massive part in the purchase of a car on finance.

There are a few ways you can buy a car on finance, with Personal Contract Purchase (PCP) by far the most popular of these. Hire Purchase (HP) and a straight-up motor loan follow someway behind, though the latter is quite popular for cars at the lower end of the price spectrum.

For all three, you need to show that you are able to afford repayments and that you have a good history of making such payments on previous occasions.

If you are able to show such great consistency and affordability, then you’ll be rewarded with near-guaranteed acceptance and very reasonable interest rates – however, if these two factors are tough to showcase, the opposite is unfortunately true.

All is not lost, though, for those who might be suffering from bad credit, as there are usually ways in which you can improve your credit rating to a point where pressing the ‘apply’ button is no longer a fear-filled moment.

Below is a graphic with some fairly straightforward methods to achieve this. Of course, if you have had the misfortune of being bankrupt at any point, then things will be a bit tougher, but getting the basics right can usually give you firm foundations to achieve a solid credit rating.