<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by janhigginskcmo:
I was able to talk them to put $5,000.00 on a card, even though we were paying cash for the car. I would have liked to do the full $20,000.00. The reason they would not let us do more is because more is because too many people would go bankrupt after putting them on credit cards....meaning the dealers would lose their money. </font>
Car dealers and credit institutions are FOS. The reason the dealer won't let you put the whole car on your card is usually because they don’t want to lose the 2%-5% (less for debit cards) credit services fee. Every time you pay for something with a credit (and even debit) card, the seller is losing money to their merchant services company, money that helps pay for the credit services infrastructure along with award points and so on. It only SEEMS like all products cost the same regardless of how you pay for them, but in reality you pay more to a seller when you pay with cash or check because they get to keep more of your money.
VISA et. al. forbid sellers to charge different prices to customers who charge their purchases, and so the dealer is generally unable to do anything but refuse to take the full payment by credit. Most other retailers have long since factored the ~3% credit services charge into most products they sell, but for some reason this never seemed to happen with car dealers.
Maybe just get a loan and then pay off the loan with a credit card? Buy $30,000 (max per year) worth of gov. bonds and then sell them and use that cash to buy the car? There must be dozens of ways to get around this issue.