In January of this year My husband Steve was driving to work on icy roads when he slid into the rear end of a truck who's driver was checking out a six car pile up at the foot of the hill. Steve was fine, but our poor 2001 Mitshibishi was totalled, and the driver of the truck must have been fine also because he drove off and did not wait for the police to be called.

Steve still had his old 72 Chevy Nova to drive to work, but I was now out of a car so we decided to finance another car somewhere else then go to our bank to re-finance this new car in six months giving our slow insurance company time to pay off the loan on our old car. So we went to Victory Nissan and decided to purchase a 2006 Nissan Sentra after we were told that the blue book value on it was $10, 500. We put $2000 down on it, signed the papers, and drove away in our new car thinking that this was what we were paying for the car. What we were actually charged was hidden under a lot of other charges so that hubby would have had to do some subtracting to find it, and he thought that they sold enough cars that they would not cheat us so he did not do the math. Our interest rate was 16.9% on this contract, but we thought that this was okay since we would only be making payments at this rate for about five months.

Last week we had owned the Nissan for six months so we went into our bank to get it re-financed. It was at this time we learned that instead of the $10, 500 that we thought we had paid for the car, we had been charged $14, 125 before taxes and other things were added to the loan and that we now owed $4000 more for the car then it was worth even after paying $2000 down. Joann, our bank loan official, advised us to go back and talk to the General Sales Manager which we did, and he claims that our car simply depreciated $4000 in value since we left there with it six months ago. We can never get this car re-financed because we will always owe more on it then it is worth. It is not right for this car lot to tell us the blue book value on the car when we asked how much the car was going to cost us when they had no intention of charging us anywhere near that amount.