Hi,
I am about to trade in my car for a new lease and heard from 2 of my friends that for both of them it took take the dealership over 3 weeks to pay off the car. Is that normal? how are your experiences so far. I want to avoid any bad surprises with late payment fee etc.
thanks
They can do it in a day or two by overnight mail, if they want to. Or may sit on it.
I know what they potentially could do, but in the 2 mentioned cases it seemed that the dealers wanted to save money and don’t pay interest for 3 weeks, therefore they took their time. My question is, is that happening more often or do they usually pay off the car within 2-3 days.
it is all situational, some dealers wait longer to fully fund a deal and pay off the vehicle, some deals take weeks to get bought. some are within a few days, all situational.
Deals have to be booked and funded in order for payoff to go out in most cases. If it’s a corporate store, usually the “deal” has to go to the billing department and they verify that everything is in there if not then it goes back to finance for them to put anything they need in. Contracts need to get sent out to the bank for funding as well depending on how complicated the deal may be this can take up to 3 months to get fully funded. The deal will then go to accounting where they need to book everything and scan it in before they are allowed to cut any checks related to the deals.
There’s a lot associated with deals and it all depends on the dealership’s policies as to when your car gets paid off.
good to know, thanks for the info. lets assume my 10 day payoff is 35k, and it is part of the deal to payoff the car for this price. When they payoff the car 3 month later, the calculation would be completely off and i have to pay for 3 more month the payment for the car. That mean this all would be on me and dealership can do what they want?
when i traded in my charger, i had a $35 balance left with Chrysler capital. the due payment was close to trade-in time. i communicated that with them several times and incessantly called chrysler cap until it was paid off. took about 3 weeks and i still have to give them $35 to zero out the loan because the 10-day payoff was missing interest or something, dumb.
but yes, the store will get funded for the deal before they pay off the car, which can take a couple weeks in itself.
Thanks for all the infos. I think I will write a document and have them sign, that they agree to payoff the car within 10 days and if they miss this deadline, they will be responsible for any finance charges. If they dont sign, than I will go to the next dealer.
Returned CLS 550 in October, 4 months left on lease and pulled forward to a newer model, got a letter from MBUSA saying the dealer never turned in vehicle nor paid off lease. Was sent a bill for $1,600 because they thought i kept the lease an extra month. Huge headache to deal with going back and forth between dealer and MBUSA. They finally settled the bill after a month o\f back and forth. Make sure to say something about turing the car in immediately they can really fuck up your credit if it’s not caught sooner rather than later. Happened in SoCal.
Thanks, this is exactly what I was talking about at the beginning! Seem that it happens more often than one would expect. Will for sure have them give me something in writing. This really sucks, when you buy a car from them, they want immediately the money, but when you sell them the car, they pay after 3 month, are you kidding me!!
My last car was paid off in 2 days. I just asked the dealer to pay before my next payment. Before that another car was paid off in about a week.
For reference, I leased a car on a Saturday. Got the check on Wednesday
Aren’t we talking about dealer paying the payoff amount to the bank?
my bad, i didn’t have a loan
Maybe I got it wrong 
What if you realize you got into a bad loan. Could you try to pay off your trade before them to void the loan?