If you’re looking for a dealer in St. Louis that offers Guaranteed Car Financing, you’re probably at least suspicious that your credit isn’t perfect. You might have looked into other options, like bad credit financing. These options are similar, but there are important differences between them.

In a bad credit car loan, the money for you to buy the car is usually lent by a service that focuses on lending. These are third party businesses that work closely with car dealers to provide loans. That means if a person defaults on a loan (i.e. fails to pay the loan), the company that offered the loan takes the loss.

With guaranteed auto financing, it’s usually the dealer itself who takes the responsibility for the loan. The money for you to purchase the car comes directly from the dealer, so if you default, the dealer takes the loss.

Often, making payments on a guaranteed car financing loan involves going to the dealer and presenting payments in person. And these payments can have different terms, maybe requiring you to go to the dealer every week to make a payment.

Often a dealer who offers guaranteed credit financing doesn’t do a credit check, so if you don’t have great credit it won’t be a problem.

The downside is that many dealers who offer guaranteed car financing don’t report your payments to the bureaus. So while you may get a vehicle, and it may not require showing a credit report, all those payments you’re making won’t be doing anything to bring your credit back up. So the next time you need a car, you may need to work out a similar deal.

But there is a rhyme and reason to it all. The trick is to spend some time upfront learning the ins and outs.

When applying for a bad credit car loan, if you do get a credit report from more than one reporting bureau you’ll notice that the scores probably aren’t the same. Don’t worry – this is the norm. Each one reports things a little differently. And the differences happen for a few different reasons.

First, each of the reporting bureaus has to collect a bunch of information about you. Each one independently researches your credit history. Some bureaus may look at certain items first, others start in a different place. And depending on when a reporting bureau last checked into your history, the research will say different things. So that’s one place where a little bit of irregularity comes in.

The other big reason why there’s variance between scores from different agencies is the actual math they apply to your stats to create your score. In the same way that 2 college basketball teams may have the same record, but one is ranked higher than another, two different credit bureaus could be looking at the same stats, but come to different conclusions on your credit worthiness.

What’s the takeaway? Check all three of your scores every year or two to make sure they’re correct and up to date. You don’t want one score messing with the others when you apply for a bad credit car loan.