I wasn't planning to get a car for several more years, but CFC made buying a car early worth it. I had an 05 Scion tC and a (clunker) 94 Dodge Dakota. Cash for clunkers put a new Mini Cooper S in my reach with almost no car payment. So I spent a month selling the Scion, and was due to turn in my clunker Friday morning when the money ran out and the dealer got shy of doing the deal. It left me in a bad spot because I didn't want to buy a car without CFC's at all, but I was now driving a mostly unmaintained unreliable car for a daily driver, since my perfectly good car was already sold. There was no warning things were about to go to crap with the program.

I was lucky things worked out by the end of Friday, but I spent a harrowing 9 hours camped at the dealer making sure I was first in line for any remaining funds in the program, and (slowly) submitting the paperwork to the cars.gov site. Cars.gov was so spotty that I participated in the document submission part (and had better luck than the dealer) to make things go faster.

I never would have gotten involved in the program if I'd known it could have run out at any minute and endangered my finances.