Alright got a tough one for you financial experts?

Hi so I have had my car loan financed with Honda Financial since october. Its a 6 year term with a 3.49% Interest rate. The balance owed is 23,900 and the value of my car is 17,500. I had about 2,500 in negative equity from my old trade in but other than that the upside down part is how fast a civic depreciates. I didn't know this when i got it, i always thought a Civic would be in high standing for its durability. Anyways my monthly payments are at 420 a month. I would like to bring those down to maybe 350-360? If possible. Anyone have any advice on what to do? Should i refinance? Can i contact my current auto loan provider and ask them? I just don't want to be paying 420 a month for another 5 years… I'm getting married in two months and it would be great if we had a bit more breathing room financially. I have my emergency savings. But i will not touch that for this situation. Basically, with all our bills and expenses at the end of the month we would have about 10 bucks… So… What to do about this auto loan. My fico score is a 731 by the way. Income about 2.2k gross monthly. Yeah… Working for a bank sucks, they pay cheap.

You want a lower payment for a shorter term? Those are opposing goals. You might be able to refinance for a shorter term (I highly recommend it. Six years is crazy.) but your payments have to go up. Or you can lower the payments but, the term will be longer - if they offer car loans longer than six years.

The only other, poor, option is to sell it at a loss, pay back the $6K shortfall and buy something more affordable. Even a motorcycle. Those are cheap to buy, maintain, and insure.

You're already getting an excellent interest rate on the loan. Since you evidently put little down AND folded $2500 of negative equity into the new loan, of course you should expect your balance to exceed the value of the car. That's a reflection on your financial decisions, not Honda Civics.

Refinancing to a lower payment means a longer loan term than what you have remaining on the current loan. Your best choice at this point is to stick with what you've bought.

Refinancing isn't an option. Being $6k underwater, lenders aren't going to want to get involved and even if they did, it certainly wouldn't be at an interest rate as low as 3.49%. Unfortunately, there's no quick fix here. As I see it, you've got 3 options:

1) Suck it up and just live with the payments you've got and look elsewhere in your budget for places to cut costs.

2) Figure out how to be a 1-car family for a couple of years, sell the car, use the emergency savings to pay off the balance and dedicate $360/month towards replenishing those savings. It would take you roughly a year and a half to replace the $6k savings. After that, you would be in a position of being able to use that $360/mo to start building up a down payment for a car.

3) Get a second job and devote all of that income towards paying down the current loan. If you could bring home an extra $300/month and put it all on the loan it would shave off about 2 years of payments.