The finance company called me Friday and explained exactly what the clause meant. My nephew hadn’t refinanced the van into his name. Instead, the contract allowed the lender to transfer the remaining balance directly to me if he missed enough payments. I asked how much that balance was. The woman gave me the number, and I had to sit down. It was more than twenty-eight thousand dollars. I reminded her that I had only agreed to guarantee the van for eighteen months. She said that was the problem. The eighteen months applied to his payment arrangement, not to my guarantee. I asked whether he had ever applied to refinance. She said yes. He’d applied twice.
I called my nephew and asked why he hadn’t told me. He said the refinancing hadn’t gone through because his credit was too low. I asked why he had let the van get repossessed if he knew I was responsible. He said he thought the company would “work something out.” Then I asked why my sister had told me the loan would be finished before Christmas. He said she didn’t understand the paperwork. I reminded him that neither of them had read the contract before I signed it. He laughed and said I was making this bigger than it was. Then he said something I hadn’t expected: “The van wasn’t really the problem.” I asked what that meant. He said there was another loan attached to the same agreement.
The finance company sent me the complete file. My signature was on a second page I’d never seen. It wasn’t for the van. It was a personal guarantee covering a business line of credit that my nephew had opened three months later. I called the company and asked why my signature was attached to it. The representative said the document had been submitted as part of the refinancing application. I told her I’d never signed it. She put me on hold, then came back and said the signature had been witnessed at the same branch where I’d signed the original van paperwork. The witness’s name was my sister’s. Then she told me something worse: the refinancing application had been rejected, but the personal guarantee was still active. And the debt scheduled to transfer to me next month wasn’t the van loan at all — it was the business line of credit.
