These days most people will use financing when they are buying a new car. That means that you are going to have to know how to get the best possible deal on your financing. The best way to do this is to do some research ahead of time; it will put you in a much better bargaining position when it comes time to work out the loan for your new car.
The most important car loan tip is to make sure that you shop around for loans before you start shopping for a car. Most people will simply take the loan that they are offered by the car dealer. This is a mistake since you can almost always get a better rate if you take the loan from the bank. Even if it turns out that you the dealer does offer you a better rate having the loan approval from the bank in your pocket will give you a lot more leverage when it comes to negotiating with the dealer.
It is also important to make sure that you know ahead of time how much you can afford. What you want to do is figure out what monthly payments you can afford and then determine what that translates to in terms of the price of the car. The reason for this is that it will give you a good idea of what kind of car you can afford to buy. More importantly it will make it easier for you to negotiate with the car dealer to ensure that you are getting the best price on both the car and the financing.
A lot of the time when you start talking to the dealer about the cost of a car he will talk to you about the monthly cost rather than the total cost of the car. This is not something that you want; you want to negotiate the total cost of the car not the monthly payments. Really what you want to do is to agree on the total price of the car and then you can start talking about financing. This is a lot easier to do if you know what the cost of the car translates to in terms of monthly payments.
One other thing about car loans that you need to think about is whether or not taking one is even a good idea. As a rule a car is not a great investment so it really isn't the sort of thing that you should be borrowing money to buy. In reality you would be a lot better off waiting until you have saved up the money before you buy a new car. In practice of course few people do that and they will in fact finance the purchase of their car. Just keep in mind that this is not a great idea financially.