I’ve had a dream of someday owning a Honda S2000 ever since I saw Johnny Tran in The Fast and the Furious beat the crap out of the VW and uttered his famous words “Too soon, Junior”. The point has come in my life where I’m able to afford such a car and mature enough to not make stupid decisions and get myself killed in it. I began the search by going through Craigslist and just seeing what the prices are and was I shocked to find what was available out there. Perhaps its the website but the cars that were for sell were usually very high miles (understandable since it’s a pretty old car) but the majority of them have cosmetic damages and/or salvaged. The last part is also understandable since people would drive these pretty hard leading to the higher probability of damages and wrecking the vehicle. Therefore my main concern was to find one with low miles and was well taken care of by it’s previous owner. I went next to Car Max which just opened a new location near my house; I’ve never heard of Car Max before till they opened the store nearby. And amazingly enough, they had a RED one with 44K miles!! This was too good to be true! I called them and told them to reserved the car for me and that’s when I began the process of trying to buy the car. This is the review of my experience with the lender Light Stream.
Light Stream is a subsidiary of Sun Trust Bank which is a well known and trusted bank with $175 billion in assets. I found Sun Trust by Googling “used car loans” and it was the first thing that popped up. Their loans were very competitive with the local credit unions at 2.84% for a 72-month loan. The best part of my experience with applying for this loan was how simple it was. I’ve applied for loans with other banks/companies before and it felt like it took at least 1 hour to fill out all the information. I can honestly say this was the most simple, easiest, and user-friendly loan application I’ve ever dealt with.
You fill out the typical information like your address, loan amount, term, income, non-liquid assets, and liquid assets. After you enter in all the information they send you an email stating that they’ll respond to your loan application within the next day and they are good for it! I received an email the next day asking for further documentation. What they wanted to see was a pay stub and statements backing up my liquid assets. This was very simple to upload and they responded within hours of me uploading the information. They state that the information had to have a date within the past 30 days but my statements haven’t came in for the last month yet. I told them this and said I needed the money within the next few days. They adjusted to my situation and waived the 30 day requirement and approved my loan!
The next steps were extremely easy as well. Once I was approved, I just signed back into my account and enter in my banking information for where I wanted the funds transferred to. I then picked a date on when I wanted the money (it could be same day if done before 11:30 AM EST) and even when I wanted to pay the bill!
I actually enjoyed applying for a loan with Light Stream. I think they really fit well with my age group as they are extremely responsive and quick along with very simple and minimalist controls. Next time I need a loan for something, I will definitely look to them first and I recommend you check them out as well!