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USAA Complaint - Went out of their way to be difficult - Car Loan

Car Loan - Complaint
Review by sandi_bee168 on 2012-01-01
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS -- My husband and I are both Active Duty, and have been USAA members for 14 years. We have bought several vehicles using USAA for our financing, bought our house, have a credit card, all of our insurance, etc. In the last 5 years or so we have noticed a severe decline in quality of service that we receive from USAA. The final straw was this week when we were "pre-approved" for a car loan up to 50K (yikes)at 4.25%. I had been thinking about trading in my vehicle for something a little smaller with better mileage. Needless to say, I did NOT need 50K, and was dumbfounded when we accepted the offer and were given terms that not only did not reflect our good credit rating but were completely ridiculous. The interest rate was 12.99%! My husband negotiated with them for over 2 hours and finally were given an offer of 4.99%. We figured that was a fairly decent rate, and off to the dealership we went. After spending a couple of hours negotiating trade in and purchase price, we were finalizing the paperwork. Mr. Finance Guy called USAA to verify the approval on the electronic loan check, and here's where it gets really good... Apparently, USAA never intended to do this car loan because the final approval amount on the electronic check was a full 5000.00 UNDER msrp for the vehicle! In simple terms, there was no way we were going to buy this car with USAA because they never intended to give us the amount we would need to finance it! There is a happy ending though. We applied for financing through Toyota, and were given not only an instant approval, BUT!!! Get this!!! We were given a final interest rate of 4.19%. Moral of the story: USAA has contracted out so many of their services and on any given day you can get a nice heaping helping of crappy attitude when you call to talk to a customer service representative. Needless to say, we have started shopping for new insurance, looking into a credit union for banking services, and are working to pay off the credit card we hold with USAA. We certainly won't be recommending them to anyone anymore either.
Comments:
Posted by Alain on 2012-01-03:
Drop a note to the FTC at http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/index.shtml about this. While it doesn't impact your event (you've taken care of that by going with another company), it will add to notifications about USAA that, should they become numerous, will attract attention (and possibly action) to their practices.

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