Charged $4000 Over Blue Book Value

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 totaled, 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, and our insurance company was taking forever to pay our wrecked car loan off so we decided to finance another car somewhere else then go to our bank to re-finance the new car in six months giving our insurance company time to pay off the loan on our old car. So we went to East Tn Nissan or Victory Nissan or whatever they are calling themselves today, and decided to purchase a 2006 Nissan Sentra after we were told that the blue book value on the car 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 it. My hubby was the only one to sign the contract, and the contract was written so that the only way you could find the original price of what we were being charged for the Nissan was to do some subtracting which Steve did not do before he signed the papers because he felt that they sold enough cars that they did not have to cheat anyone. 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 tried the BBB but they said that they could not help us. We can't get this car re-fianced at what we were charged for the car because we will always owe more on it then it is worth until we get it paid off, and by the time we pay it off we will have over $25,000 in this car. It is not right to tell a customer the Blue Book Value of a car to make you believe that this is what you will be paying for it then charge you $4000 more for it.