Repossessed Vehicles on the Rise

[dollardaze]

The downturn of our economy has more and more vehicles being repossessed these days. Estimates of as many as 1.6 million vehicles could be repossessed this year, this is the most in at least a decade.

The country's large banks have not yet reported that they've seen large numbers of defaults on car loans, but the repo companies say that the number of repossessions are growing steadily. One repo company based in North Carolina has reported an increase of the number of repossessions for its company alone has gone from 20-30 vehicles last year, per week to 50 now.

Buy Here/Pay Here Vehicle Sales Companies are also having to repossess more vehicles this year. One company's representative said that in 2007, the company repossessed about 25 vehicles, but in just in the first half of this year, the company has repossessed just as many.

Many financial institutions are beginning to contact late-payers much sooner than the normal 60 days in which they used to wait before asking for payment. They want to try to work out a payment schedule so that repossession may not be necessary.

It's been reported that many of the people that are in default with vehicle loans are not lower-income consumers that took out subprime car loans, but most are middle-income earners, with repossessions being made of vehicles costing $20,000 to $30,000.

[pennypinch]

This seems to go hand and hand with all of the foreclosures happening these days. It is to be expected. The things we could afford a year ago are no longer affordable to many people. Times are tough and it shows. I wonder now what these people are going to do without their vehicles. Will they have other transportation available to them to go to and from work everyday?

[moneysense]

I have only ever bought one vehicle on which I made payments and that was from a private owner. Other than that, we have always paid cash for good used vehicles.

That aside, this whole thing has to do with jobs, pay from those jobs, or should I say lack of good pay from jobs.

A lot of workers are part time and only making minimum wage, but they still need a vehicle to get back and forth to work and with minimum wage only being $6.25 an hour now, it is harder and harder for people to pay rent and buy groceries, and pay utilities let alone make a car payment.

[dollardaze]

The economy, with the higher cost of gasoline, food and almost everything else is hitting most Americans hard if they happen to have a loan for a car or home, or anything else for that matter.

I'm sure we haven't seen the worst of it yet, it just seems to be snowballing more and more. In my family, we are just trying to hold on to what we have right now, I don't think it's a time to be trying to buy anything that we don't absolutely need, it's just not worth the price or the headaches.