Newbie with car delima - keep or not keep?

[jojuvan]

I first have to say that I have found a lot of great info on this site, but I have a specific question. We are filing bankruptcy and are trying to decide if we want to give up our 2005 van or not. We have 4 children, so we need a van. We have a beat up old Thunderbird that my husband uses to get to and from work. We have a $360/month payment on the van, we owe $11,000 and it's only worth 4,000 for a trade. Our lawyer said we could get a loan before bankruptcy if someone would finance us. We tried one dealer, but we didn't get approved. So my questions are:
1. Does anyone know of any loan companies that will approve REALLY bad credit?
2. How soon after bankruptcy can you get another car loan?

We are thinking about giving up our current car and just buying a car outright. We only have about 4,000 to spend, and are looking to trade that in as soon as we could so that we have something more reliable. Any info is appreciated. Thanks!

[debtmonster]

There are vans that do exist for $4000 or under. Check some of these out.

Mercury

Nice Dodge Ram

Really nice family van

Sharp looking Dodge!

Nice Windstar

Voyager

Nice Windstar

'03 Windstar

Chevy Venture

'03 Kia Sedona (reduced in price)

Wow... it looks like you get a much nicer and newer looking vehicle for much less money than buying some small sedan or SUV when buying one of these. Amazing. I'll have to consider one of these myself!

I know somebody who bought a '96 Caravan with 200,000 miles and that thing seemed to run good for quite a while. Nothing something I would do...

All of the ones in this post have under 100,000 miles. I could have posted more, but there's a lot of cutting and pasting to do.

[ansky0007]

My suggestion would be to try to do a 722 redemption, It can strip all the negative equity. The rate would be much higher maybe 24% but who cares if you have some cash on hand. I would do the 722 redemption and hope they can negiotiate the vehicle for its current value ($4000 to $5000) and after discharge if you have $4k pay off the new redemtion loan and you will own it outright. Its better in my opinion to keep a vehicle which you know you maintained than taking a chance on another used car.

[debtmonster]

If you own it outright or it has major equity, can't they seize it in the bankruptcy then? I thought if you own a vehicle outright, you're supposed to own a one with a very low value?

Try plugging $5,000 into here @ 24% and see what the payments can be... that's if you get approved. If you don't get approved, so be it. Give the van back and as you can see, there's a lot of low priced vans out there.

https://www.drivercredit.com/calculator.php

If I lose my car, I am considering one of those vans. I've never seen such clean, practical vehicles for the money. I rarely ever see $4,000 sedans or coupes as nice as some of those vans.